Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors.

Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more. Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones.

The restaurant recommendations it gave me are pretty decent for an early alpha. In New York City, it suggested Katz’s Delicatessen (a classic), Artichoke Pizza (trendy), Momofuku Noodle Bar (if only I could get in), and Hundred Acres (my wife went there last night! no joke). Each spot contains links back to profiles on Foursquare, Yelp, Hunch, or other places, just like a local search engine.

“It starts out looking at what your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare friends like, and then gets smarter over time as people give feedback,” says Hunch founder Chris Dixon. He notes that the feature just launched in alpha and is far from fully baked. His plan is to partner with Foursquare, Yelp and others to get their direct data feed of all of their places, which should improve the data.

Hunch took a hit when it started requiring that all visitors sign in. According to comScore, the site went from about 750,000 unique visitors in May, to 250,000 in June, but it already started rebounding in July to 350,000. These numbers undercount Hunch’s actual visitors by at least half, but the trend is right. By focusing on its core “taste graph” and giving people actionable recommendations every time they log in, Hunch is making the right moves to get back on track. Before, Hunch was interesting, but vague. I wasn’t really sure why I needed to go there. Now there are more and more specific reasons, and Hunch Local is something I will definitely go back to try out when I need to find a new place for lunch.

• Zuckerberg: “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists.”
• Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide

Comcast’s Tunerfish is opening to the public today; and debuting a deal with HBO to power a social check-in app for the show. Tunerfish, which was demoed at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago, was incubated by the Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) and is led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea.

Tunerfish allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. The site also encourages people to check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

Using Tunerfish’s technology, True Blood fans will have the opportunity to earn “Truebie” and “Maker” badges by Tweeting on the site while they watch and influencing their friends to do the same. Tunerfish will use these check-ins to determine and reward loyal fans with the badges.

HBO’s is also launching a True Blood Twitter Microsite, which allows True Blood fans to Tweet and access live conversations about new episodes while watching them on TV. Called Bloodcopy.com, the site will feature weekly Twitter “hosts” that will live Tweet during each episode initiating conversations, interacting with fans and facilitating giveaways. The microsite was built using Twitter’s @anywhere technology.

• Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma
• SocialGreat Starts Tracking Trendy Places For All Foursquare Cities

It was only a matter of time. Since last summer, we’ve been tracking the progress of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming platform that allows users to build engaging, real-world scavenger hunts that use their mobile devices to both receive clues and solve riddles. Until now the service has primarily catered to museums, universities, and businesses, who use it for things like tours, orientations, and team-building exercises (they’re up to over 600 paying customers). Now SCVNGR, which recently raised $4 million from Google Ventures,  is getting a bit more ambitious: it’s looking to turn the world into one big scavenger hunt, and it’s going to be taking on the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla in the process.

To mark the launch of this new consumer-facing side of SCVNGR, the startup has launched new applications for iPhone and Android (you can grab the iPhone app here, and a QR code for the Android app is here) (it’s US-only for now). If you’ve used Foursquare or Gowalla before, the applications should look pretty familiar at first — you can ‘check-in’ to any of the 20 million venues in the SCVNGR database and see what your friends are up to. But there’s a key difference: SCVNGR revolves around interactive ‘challenges’, which users are prompted to complete when they visit a venue. These can range from simple things, like the act of checking-in at a venue or taking a goofy photo with a store mannequin, to much richer experiences, depending on how creative the business gets.

SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch acknowledges that this is already a crowded space with some very well-funded competitors, but he believes that this ‘challenge’ angle will be enough to differentiate SCVNGR from the rest of the pack. He explains that the value of a check-in on a service like Foursquare tends to be very transient in nature — if you see that check-in an hour or two after it was created, there’s a good chance it is no longer relevant, as the user may well have moved on to their next destination. Challenges, Priebatsch believes, have a much longer shelf life.

As an example, Priebatsch described what might happen if you walked into a local burrito shop that had set up a few challenges on SCVNGR. After pulling out your phone and checking in, the app could prompt you to build an origami figure out of the tin foil your burrito came in, and to upload a picture of your creation to the service.  Doing so would reward you with some SCVNGR points (which are currently valueless but will likely be part of a reward system in the future). So while your friends may not see your check-in by hours or days, they would probably still enjoy the photo of your burrito’s tin foil swan. Another challenge could charge users with using clues scattered around a store to solve a riddle, for example.

Challenges can be created by anyone, including both business owners and their customers (you could also create challenges at a non-business venue like a park if you wanted to). Screening and flagging systems are in place to ensure that there aren’t any inappropriate challenges. And while most challenges will be created from phones, businesses that want to create challenges at multiple locations at once (like a restaurant chain), will be able to do so using SCVNGR’s enterprise tools.

In some ways SCVNGR is late to the game — aside from Foursquare, there are plenty of other competitors, including Loopt, Gowalla, Brightkite, and probably Facebook in the near future, and all of them are going to be vying for attention from local businesses. Every venue in SCVNGR’s database will come with three basic challenges (one of which is a basic check-in), but it will only be fun if users and businesses start putting the time in to make engaging, creative challenges. In this sense, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

All of that said, I like that SCVNGR is setting out to offer a more engaging experience than Foursquare and Gowalla, which I got bored of pretty quickly (yes, I know plenty of people are totally addicted to them — I just find the gaming elements of these services to be superficial). I suspect the popularity of SCVNGR will be tied to how widespread challenges are, and, more important, how fun they are. Likewise, SCVNGR is going to have to incent users to play the game by getting businesses to offer rewards and coupons for completing their challenges (show them the money). Some gamers will keep jumping on to SCVNGR because it’s fun, but the service needs a carrot to dangle in front of users to get them hooked.

• The Little Secret of Web Startups
• Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions

Location-based social network Loopt has just updated its iPhone and BlackBerry applications, adding a hybrid map feature that allows you to view a single map (seen at right) that plots nearby points of interest, friends, and events all at once. The new update also brings LooptPulse, which the company has already launched for the iPhone and iPad, to the BlackBerry.

LooptPulse, which was first announced last fall, is Loopt’s discovery feature. If there are a lot of Loopt users checking in at a nearby event or restaurant, the service will recommend it to you, even if your friends aren’t necessarily there. Loopt generates some of these recommendations using data from its partners like Zagat, CitySearch, Bing, and Tastingtable (recently added partners include SonicLiving, Zvents, and Metromix).

Loopt has been around for much longer than hot location startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, and has more registered users than either of them. But in some senses it’s playing catchup — for years Loopt was a passive service that constantly tracked your location as opposed to the check-in services that have recently caught on. Loopt has now shifted its model to compete more directly with these services, and its Pulse discovery features go beyond what Foursquare currently offers.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a branded TC version of the service here</a.

• Mark Cuban Dreams Of Minority Report. So Do I. But We’re Not There…
• Zuckerberg: “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists.”