Call it A Hunch

 "Call it a hunch . . . ba-dum-chi!"

If  a friend invites you to play the Hunch Twitter game, don't bother.

It's described here, by an apparently gullible blogger at TechCruch. How can I call him/her gullible if I played the Twitter game because of the suggestion? Well, at least I didn't believe this was anything out of the ordinary. Or worthwhile.

Basically, the "game" invites you to enter your Twitter name, and then says it's going to ask you a series of questions based on your contacts, or your tweets, or your hat size, or something or other. I put the coin in the slot and got this as the first question:

Have you ever used a Polaroid camera?

I answered no. I've used many kinds of cameras, but never a Polaroid. Hunch got it wrong; they'd predicted I had used a Polaroid.

So on to the interminable string of questions (they don't end; after 25 or so I kept hoping the next question would be "Does Hunch ask way too many questions in this stupid game?"

I have to say that the questions were too generic to think that Hunch had done anything but a cursory examination of my contacts or anything else. Here are some of the earth-shattering questions that Hunch got "right":

•  Have you ever been in love?
• Have you ever been to an art gallery?
• What hemisphere do you live in?
• Do you think women are inferior to men?
• How comfortable are you at using technology?
• Do you like salad?
• Do you believe the world will end in 2012?

And so on. Absolutely stupid questions that anyone with only the basic technology of asking the question could hope to get right with an amazing percentage of correctness.

Based on my Twitter followers, they should have been asking these kinds of questions:

• Do you think Donald Trump is a kind of god?
• Are you really, really sick of all the MLM twits on Twitter?
• Do you live in the vain hope that everyone is clicking on the links you've tweeted?
• What do you think of people who hate children?
• Does Jim Douglas wear boat shoes when he's driving Herbie?
• Does Pumaman really fly like a moron?

So color me unimpressed with Hunch's little twitter game. This is the only kind of hunch I want to hear about on the internet: