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.
Asking your friends about a product or place of interest can only get what they saw that they liked or disliked. Talking to a person that sells a product or works at a place of interest would be a better idea to retrieve information on everything that is good or bad about a product. That’s my guess anyway.
i don’t agree. I always ask friends for recommendations on things to do. what they say means more than just about any other source of information for me.
I’ve had some bad recommendations before from people I know, but I don’t trust the judgement of some. There is truth in what you say though.
Now that I think about it, it’s possible that you can receive a lot of information about a product from the seller, but from a friend you could receive the review and hands-on experience.
I’ve been using it for a while, it is great, better than any Q&A out there, bc it is semi realtime plus u do not need to deal with the web based complexity. actually 2 day before its launch my friend discussed the idea of a real time Q&A to me
To add to ur comment, you can get more than one answer to a question. my friends’ say is more reliable than the seller point of view.
Agree with MA on this one — they got a robust writeup in the Grey Lady (nytimes) today.
the problem Mike is that you have so many friends on Facebook that Vark keeps bugging me about friends of Michael Arrington who have questions, and I know they are not really friends of yours.
You should keep your Facebook profile with less friends.
but would you be on that list?
You think asking someone who may be on commission or a spiff if they sell more of one thing then another is a reliable source of impartial information? More so than a trusted friend?
I am not entirely sure I see what Aardvark is offering that I can’t get by posting a question through a tweet or status update (or both at the same time if you use Tweetdeck)? Why cart all my connections over to a new location to achieve what I can already?
Or am I missing something?
Facebook Connect is a neat way to painlessly grow their base however. They should really look at adding Twitter oAuth and OpenID too to bring in other connections.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
fb can implement this in 24 hours…or any fb app can build it within no time
wonder how they raised so much money, with fb dependency and zero IP!
Tons of IP on this one I think. They have to understand the questions, categorize them, route them to the right person, track when answers are good or bad, etc. I bet this took a lot of smart people a long time to build.
I’ve been using Aardvark for a while now and it does seem to be quite useful. It’s great that they’re opening up to more people as the increased reach will should increase the quantity if not quality of answers.
This is coool. Facebook rocks! You can find me on facebook. Facebook sounds more like a Nation now giving passport to other site owners through their application (facebook connect) so that her citizens like me can connect anywhere the app is…Cool
I found the emails asking me questions kind of annoying.
anyone heard of twitter?
I think Renae nailed it
Why is this news? Because they spent a half hour to implemented facebook connect, or because they were funded by August Capital?
Any chance you could give us a break on the huge ads on the RSS feed? I get that you want to monetize aggressively, but dating ads? Really.
You’re perilously close to the line of losing readers.
I’m loving aardvark! IM based notifications—clever!
i’ve been in the beta for months and really enjoy it, use it almost exclusively now through google talk (gchat style)…still waiting to see how much better it gets with volume in the user base…if somebody on here wants an invite without the facebook connect thing, just track me down and send me yo’ email and i’ll ping you from inside the service
Just used it.. Very impressive. I asked a question through IM and got a response in seconds!! Wow!
Please use befor you try and condemn..
This is a link they gave me.. you guys should join, then you can dismiss them credibliy
http://vark.com/s/PSTt
Ahh… I see. My apologies. I didn’t reallize this is their launch out of beta.
I am sorry but I had to add this.
Aardvark…making sense of Twitter!
I hae got 2 useful answere in a few minuites. To experiment, i will send the same question on Twitter and i am sure i will get NO response!
“But it only works well, the company says, when you’re[sic] friends are already on the service.”
your*
Thanks for pointing this out, I’m going to give it a shot.
I use Aardvark every day and it’s incredibly useful.
How does it differ from twitter and Yahoo! Answers?
Just use it..Then ask.
It is possibly the most overfunded annoyance I have ever seen. It’s like having a stupid friend that keeps on asking you the same question again and again…. and most of them are not even well categorized. It is a annoying service and am pretty sure it is going to fail miserably as soon as enough people use it. Twitter def. better to get opinions and questions answered.
I see that Facebook is on its path of becoming the Google of social media. Now MySpace needs to really step up to stay in the game.
And the internet is for what? I’m getting a tech overload!
Regards,
Albert
The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles
I’ve been using Aardvark for a couple of month and it’s been useful.
I would love to see a twitter integration feature that allows me to get answers from people that I am not connected with.
This is stupid.
My friends might not necessarily know what I want to ask them. I want to ask my friends how to go about forming your own company, but none of my friends would know that, neither will their friends.
Good for movie, music recommendations. Bad for everything else.
Just a quickie to the people comparing Aardvark to Twitter — its the difference between a shotgun and a laser targeter. You can broadcast a question to all your followers on Twitter, which is fine. Aardvark contacts each one, in order of liklihood of being able to answer the question. Thus Twitter is esp good for things like ‘anyone want to play basketball tonight’? Whereas Aardvark is better for something like ‘Whats the best place to score tix to the Lakers tonight’, where it targets someone who has Basketball and LA in their profile. Twitter is basically a 1 to many broadcast system (like email or IM are more 1 to 1 ) . Aardvark will probably use it as well in the future though, but it specifically wants to avoid spamming your friends constantly.
As to the limitations of your friends knowledge. Well there is the Friend of Friends things – and on top of that we also include your networks that you belong to you. If you’re friends (or fof) can’t help you, well, at that point you either need to get one of them to learn or learn yourself.
You’d be surprised how much even the 2nd degree friends get you in diversity. Difference between 100 and 10K people.
I agree with Anon. Plus tons of people who have twitter don’t have the high follower numbers of the well-connected TC readers. Aardvark is a great idea that will only get better as more people use it.
Aardvark sounds like the original business model of Y*lp!, Friend sending friends recommendations.
It would be nice if they would spend some engineering cycles on making sure they are CAN-SPAM compliant:
http://www.ftc....erce/bus61.shtm
Right now they are sending out emails (I’ve received several this week alone) with no visible opt-out option. This comes with a fine, per occurrence, of $16,000.
Fix it boys.
I am not really that impressed with Aardvark. If a friend sent me so much spam over Aardvark. I will either block him or throw him out of my contact list.
Instead of 1:1 communication on Aaardvark, a 1:n communication on Facebook makes more sense. I can ask a question on my FB profile and a knowledgeable friend will answer me without bugging everyone else.
Just signed up and so far have gotten pretty cool results.
Hey its great news that Advark also supporting facebook connect. Thanks for news