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For the past month or so I have been testing out a service that allows a user to ask self proclaimed professionals a question and get prompt answers. When I first logged onto Aardvark I was pretty skeptical that the service would bennifit me at all. I am not generally in the business of asking random people (outside of Google of course)  questions. When setting up your account, you inform Aardvark of fields that you believe your knowledgeable in so it can ask you questions in those areas when you are available. After this, you tell Aardvark how to contact you. This can include strictly email, strictly when you are signed into a specific instant message network, or any combination of the two. This is the key to the service.

Allowing Aardvark to contact you and in turn you contact it when you are available makes the service shine. About twice a day I get an instant message on my GTalk account asking me if I am available to answer a question in one of the fields I tagged as being knowledgeable in. Aardvark tells me the tag, then lets me choose whether to view the question or not. After viewing the question, it again lets me choose if I would like to answer it, or pass it on to another Aardvark member.

I ask Aardvark questions every once and a while, but not nearly as often as I answer them. Something about the community of it all makes it very enjoyable. The handful of times I have asked questions, I received responses

within minutes of asking. This brings me to the next handy thing about Aardvark, they have an iPhone app in beta right now. The app has push notifications and the ability to view all unanswered questions. It only pushes you answers to questions you have asked, which is good in my opinion, as I would not want question notifications popping up on my phone. The answering feature is an awesome time waster when sitting in a car or at the doctors office.

The more I interact and use the service, the more pleased I am by its ease of use and usefulness. The site and how it works has been well thought out, not leaving too many features too be desired. Like most community based web applications, the more users that use Aardvark, the better it becomes. A smaller feature that will hopefully one day be very useful is it’s ability to pinpoint a geographic area that a user is familiar with, and present relevant questions to that user regarding that area. This will play a huge roll in their upcoming, geo-aware iPhone app. The app uses the iPhone’s GPS to locate the user. If the user asks a question about, say, nightlife in a city while they are located in said city, a user that has identified that city, and potentially neighborhood will be able to answer the question.

All in all Aardvark get two thumbs up in my book. Ease of use, rich feature set and plenty of ways to take advantage of it are all the makings of a winner. If you get a chance, give it a try.

Update: They have added a bunch of new social features to the site itself, allowing users to ask and answer questions from it, rather than use an IM service or email.

[Aardvark]