Yesterday, Anand, one of my friends, pinged me. He asked me to try out Aardvark. You can help a lot by being there, he said. I was curious and so I signed up. I found that there were already 8 of my Facebook friends on the network, people I respect.
Today I spent some time checking it out. It is an amazing application. I think after Twitter, this is one of the most imaginative and useful applications I have seen.
This is how it works:
1. You sign up here.
2. Specify a few topics in which you have expertise and willing to share it with others
3. You also specify an IM app that you would like to use with the service.
4. You can start adding friends and your perception of their expertise (using tags).
You can start posing questions to Aardvark service using your favorite IM client. You get back answers in a few minutes. I tried a few questions and even had one question sent to me. So far, the service rocks. I am really thrilled about its potential as a distributed knowledge management system. There are lots of other features (I am just trying a few out). Check it out here. From their blog:
But there’s another side to the real-time web phenomenon that we here at Aardvark think is even more powerful than this, a change of paradigm that is even more fundamental.
What really matters is the increased accessibility of people online, not just information online.