Hunch.com is open to the public! (*kazoo*
*kazoo*)

Can't believe I've been working on it for two years now. It has certainly come a long way and been lots of fun. We've gotten some great coverage in the news already, including national television.

If you don't know what it is, it's a website that helps you make decisions by asking you a bunch of questions and delivering a customized recommendation. The cool part is that all the content is user-generated, from the topics to the questions to the results, and there is a pretty sweet machine learning algorithm that figures out what to tell you based on feedback from other users.

Curious? Try this embeddable version for picking a credit card.

My building finally got wired for FiOS (Verizon's fiber optic service). I had it installed today and am quite impressed!

If you don't understand these numbers, they basically mean I am unstoppable.

Hunch is now in private beta. Check out Caterina's post for details and sign up for an invitation on our home page.

Speaking of domain names, I just learned today from a friend that you can register unicode characters in a domain if you use registrars that support "IDN" (Internationalized Domain Name). DomainSite.com was the only good one I can find. Now you can visit my blog from these awesome domain names:

ʇʇɐɯ.com

忄.com

I am told by my Chinese sources that the sword-looking character means "heart".

Yahoo raised their auto renewal rates for domain names to $34.95/year. They started out at $9.95 which makes this more than a 3X hike! I guess they are just betting that their customers are too lazy to transfer their domains elsewhere. Bad bet in a down economy. MattGattis.com is now registered via NearlyFreeSpeech.net. They have an interesting business model which is called good customer service and charging fair prices.