Aardvark Open For Business Via Facebook Connect

Aardvark’s social search service has been allowing beta users to invite friends since March. But if you don’t already know someone on the service, you’ve had to wait in line. That wait ends today, though, at least for Facebook users. You can now create an account via Facebook Connect and start using the service.

The service, which we described a couple of months ago, lets users ask questions of their friends and friends of friends like “What’s the best place to go hiking in Marin?” But it only works well, the company says, when your friends are already on the service. That’s why people who weren’t able to get an invitation from a current user had to wait in line until now:

Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts (and their contacts) based on what they say they have knowledge of. If you ask taste related questions about music, books, movies, restaurants, etc., they’ll ask people who tend to show similar tastes as you in their profile.

The company was founded by Max Ventilla (Google corp dev), Nathan Stoll (Google News) and Damon Horowitz (Perspecta) and has raised $6 million in capital from August Capital, Baseline Ventures and a number of angels.