I’m on vacation this week, ostensibly, building a treehouse and taking time off. Hence the light posting schedule. But I’ve also been tracking Aardvark, the lightweight question answering service that uses your social graph, IM, and email accounts as a channel to intelligently route complicated questions to those who might best answer them, and as readers know, I’m intrigued.
So when Max Ventilla, Aardvark’s CEO, told me he was finally integrating Twitter, I knew it’d be big news.
As explained on the Vark blog, using the service on Twitter is simple:
Now you can ask Aardvark a question via Twitter: Just include ‘@vark’ and a question mark (‘?’) in your tweet Aardvark will find the perfect person to answer, and Direct Message you their response in a few minutes (Set up Aardvark to recognize your Twitter handle here: http://vark.com/profile/twitter)…..Aardvark is all about providing the questioner with a magical experience of getting any question answered in about five minutes, and providing the answerer with a gratifying experience of helping someone out in a moment of need. We think asking questions via Twitter is a natural way to bring this experience to more people.
I feel the same way. I’ve used Vark on Twitter in private beta and it worked great. Now that the service is public, I have a feeling it’s going to become one of the most useful applications on Twitter. Next step, Groups, and then watch out….
One has to wonder about the following:
1) how many queries folks will ask over SMS, current data is not strong, so a change in user behavior is required.
2) the value of the social graph, why do you need to route the question instead of just twitting your followers?
3) latency, while it’s great that you don’t have to be in front of a computer to get an answer, having an unpredictable time frame on results could cause trouble.
These days, Twitter is growing at dramatic speed. It is becoming increasingly popular and influential. It is even used to perform normal searches.
I’ve used Aardvark several times. The idea and the structure are very good, but the quality of the answers is not. You usually get no answer at all, and you often get micro answers from people who may not care about being truly helpful. Plus there is a divide in the value of the answer given vs received: “what’s a good restaurant in Soho”, the answer “Zilli” is not very helpful even if it is right, it’s just another keyword to search for, but the answerer may love the restaurant and feel it’s a satisfactory answer.
Nice blog. Good job.
I have used Aardvark too.
Thanks for sharing this development. I’m an Aardvocate and suggested this via our feedback site several weeks ago so naturally I think it’s a great idea. Max, Nathan and team take user feedback to heart and have a bright future.
Soho”, the answer “Zilli” is not very helpful even if it is right, it’s just another keyword to search for, but the answerer may love the restaurant and feel it’s a satisfactory answer
Really interesting one, i much appreciate. Thanks for sharing the information.
Twitter seems a trend like facebook before.