A couple of months from now when you’re sitting at a corporate quiz, a question will appear on the screen which will ask you to connect the African animal more popularly known as an anteater and a exciting new web portal that uses the wisdom of the crowds.
The answer you should scream out should be Aardvark. And the Aardvark roams about freely in The Mechanical Zoo, the start-up which introduced this interesting service. In their own words Aardvark is “a new type of search that makes it easy to find subjective information.”
What it does is that it takes in people’s questions and sends them to you via IM and in a neat manner you can either “try” the question or “pass” or “refer” it to someone in your friends list. And since you know your friends abilities, this increases the chances of the question being answered. Since the question is open to everyone on Aardvark, the chances increase exponentially. Aardvark also informs you whether the person whose question you are asking is online or not, in the latter case it sends your answer to them as an email.
Also as is the case with most sites, you can add contacts who are already using Aardvark from existing social networks. I try to spend at least 15 minutes everyday on this service.
So the funda being that the search is as strong as your network. Which means it helps involving those people who are experts in something, or at least have in depth knowledge. It could be about Gol guppas for all you know.
In this blog post here, the founder tries to come up with different ways to explain Aardvark in 20 words or less.
They received a 6 million round of funding last year which was led by August Capital. However despite this investment, its been a mostly hush hush affair with the 2 year old company still in private beta, creating a legion of supporters whose numbers increase only through the underground channel.
We’re giving away a limited number of free invites, please mail me at my email address (look at the end of the post) with three interests of yours and your full name.
Oh and one more thing,if its asked in a quiz tomorrow? The well, aren’t you glad you’re reading this blog post.
Thanks for this great writeup! Please let us know if you have any feedback as you’re using Aardvark, we’d love to hear from you (or any of your readers!). Just email feedback@vark.com
what is the motivation for the user to answer the queries???… and if it is only asked to people i am connected with then why not a tweet on twitter or a status update on IM.
@rob: will do
@naman: Well, don’t you like to flaunt what you know? I do certainly.
The good thing about this is that it pops up in your IM, so its really quick, there’s no need to sign into somewhere (unless you want to ask a question). Its effortless.