We live in an age where we need to Google everything and anything we need to know about. But Google is after all an index of all that lies on the internet. What if you wanted to buy something and didn’t really know where to look for? The internet might be able to help you but its usually not that helpful. Asking your friends might be really helpful, but what if your friends didn’t know either? Most probably, their friends might know.
Aardvark does just this. It creates a network of friends and their friends across which you throw around your questions and delivers their answers to you. It’s a bridge between the person asking the question and those who have the answers.
It involves extensive usage of the friend of a friend (FOAF) concept which is currently one of biggest trends in social networking. LinkedIn and Facebook already show you friend recommendations based on this concept. But Aardvark has been the first to put it to use in answering your questions.
You sign up for a free account with aardvark and then add your personal details(so that your friends can find you) and your topics of interest. Linking it to your Facebook account lets you import your interests from your FB profile. Add aardvark bot to your IM client and you are good to go. Questions on topics of your interest could flow to you and you are free to, answer, pass or refer them to your friends. The conversation happens freely through IM, with the Aardvark bot ensuring that you always know what keyword to type in. Your dashboard on Aardvark has a list of all your questions and answers, asked and answered. If IN is not your thing, you can even ask questions and answer them on the site or via Twitter.
Time required to get answers is around 4 minutes usually, But then it all depends on the question. Many questions might remain unanswered, but most objective questions are answered promptly. Aardvark would do well to bring in a reward system of badges similar to the one found on Stack overflow. Your questions are not always recognized as questions and you might be required to tag them or rephrase them if Aardvark doesn’t understand them. In spite of these trivial issues, Aardvark is a service which shows tremendous promise and is a must have bot for your IM client.
Thanks to @kushmakarsharma for recommending the site.
