ReadWriteWeb

Every ecommerce site needs to customize and personalize products for fast-moving Internet consumers. eBay is no stranger to this. In a quest to further personalize its recommendations, today eBay acquired Hunch.com. It will use the new technology to ramp up its ecommerce recommendations, including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights. Personalization is a hot trend on the Internet. It is found on sites ranging from daily deals Google Offers and Groupon to social reading apps like Zite and Flipboard.

How can you improve the results of one of the Web's most effective and respected recommendation engines? By pairing it up with another one.

That's exactly what the team at Hunch has done. The personalized recommendation service launched their browser-based Netflix Predictor today, which uses the company's "taste graph" to help determine what movie you should watch next.

Universal Music Group launched a new website today called Digster.fm, where a team of music editors curates playlists that can be listened to through music service Spotify. Spotify is great, curation is a creative act with incredible potential, and I had some hope this new effort could point towards the future of competition between music industry players. Yeah! Come on, Universal, let's see who can make the most awesome curated playlist website!

This one, however, is terrible. There were errors throughout the log-in process (you can't listen to music until you log in either), it required I give the site access to Tweet from my account and the Digster.fm Twitter account has been Tweeting out links all afternoon to websites that posted their raw press release.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of being "the guy who worries about the price of arugula," a suggestion that Obama was an elitist. Many scoffed at the remark, but according to Hunch CEO and co-founder Chris Dixon, liberals do prefer arugula while conservatives opt for iceberg lettuce. The connection between lettuce preferences and political orientation is something that Hunch has uncovered through its taste graph and recommendation engine, something that Dixon describes as "the most sophisticated system ever built for predicting human preferences."

On stage today at ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit, Dixon sat down with our own Marshall Kirkpatrick to talk about how Hunch has built its taste graph and how this sort of recommendation engine may shape the future of a more personalized Web.

One of the big reasons Netflix is so successful isn't just that it's cheap and available over the Internet. The service keeps track of what you watch, takes into account your ratings of different content, and then makes suggestions for what else to see according to all of that data. The accuracy of those predictions likely determine your opinion of the service itself.

Today Hunch has partnered up with Samsung and Digitas to launch The Smart Living Room, an "interactive microsite that makes movie watching a deeper social experience."

Creativity, they say, always builds on the past. So too do many wonderful things on the internet. What could be better to build the future on top of than our collective knowledge of the world as represented by Wikipedia? One startup technology company, recommendation service Hunch, announced today that it is dropping its use of Wikipedia data. Its stated reasons explain well why Wikipedia's incredible platform potential is not likely to be realized anytime soon.

Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th birthday tomorrow and while it's changed the world in incredible ways, it enters its second decade in the same position it began: as a destination website. In an era of web services and applications, Wikipedia could be so much more. Wikipedia as an organization would like it to be more. Unfortunately, it's not well positioned to realize its full potential yet - and the world isn't ready for it, either.

SCVNGR is a location-based service with apps for the iPhone and Android that wants to add a "game layer on top of the world." Starting today, the company is getting closer to this goal, as it is going international and expanding to about 80 new countries. Until today, SCVNGR was only available in the U.S.

SCVNGR is also switching away from its own proprietary location database. Thanks to its close relationship with Google (SCVNGR is, in part, funded by Google Ventures), the service is the first site to leverage the new Google Places API.

The majority of small and medium-sized businesses will either increase their digital marketing budgets or keep them the same in 2011, according to a new survey released by Zoomerang in partnership with GrowBizMedia.

The survey results came from a sample of over 750 SMBs, the vast majority of which have 1-25 employees. More than half (55%) of respondents reported having a marketing budget of $1,000 or less.

Last month, Condé Nast social news site Reddit asked users if they would donate their data for research purposes. This week the site made available a data dump from more than 40,000 people who opted-in to sharing what they do on the site. It's a remarkable move than every social network could learn from.

Reddit's goal for this data is to see it used to create a recommendation engine - in particular a system that would highlight some of the niche communities on Reddit that are a great place to find good topical content, but that too few people on the site have discovered. Now that the data is out in the wild, however, any number of analyses can be performed on it - and no one knows what kinds of observations about the relationship between people, web content, voting and news will be discovered. One little account preference opens up a world of opportunities: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

Caterina Fake was one of the co-founders of Flickr, an iconic web 2.0 online photo service that was sold to Yahoo. Her latest product is Hunch, a service that started out as a Q&A service but is now being positioned as a personalization service. It's basically a recommendation engine that shows you movies you want to see, books you want to read, vacation destinations you want to go to, and much more. Fake and her three co-founders at Hunch - Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Dattis - are on a mission to "map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."

I spoke to Caterina Fake to find out how Hunch got started and the progress the company has made in its ambitious mission.