While out at SXSW earlier this year I ran into Rob Spiro from Aardvark. Aardvark is a crowd sourcing application that allows its user base to ask contextually based questions of each other through instant message or email without viewing personal information. Rob was nice enough to get me into the beta, and I've been trying Aardvark out for the past few weeks.
When you sign into Aardvark they ask you for a tiny bit of personal information, including your IM name and service, and then let you pick some categories you consider yourself able to answer questions in. I chose Actionscript 3.0, Denver (where I live), and Blogging to start. You can add or remove categories whenever you like (I've expanded my list to 20 or so), but that's all you need to get started.
Within a few days I started receiving instant messages from the Aardvark bot, asking me if I could help answer questions for different users. The chat interface works really well - if you know the answer you can answer inline, if you don't you can say "pass" to pass it on, and if it's a category you know nothing about you can type "mute" to ignore it. The options are simple and make intuitive sense, and so far I've only been asked a few questions that weren't really in the domain of topics I'd volunteered to answer.
To ask questions, you simply fire up your favorite instant message client and send a question over to the bot, using exactly the same language you'd use to ask any friend. The bot parses your answer, picks some categorical information out of it, and sends it along to any users who might be able to answer.
One of my main concerns getting started was that the Aardvark bot was going to be annoying. I was worried it would IM me constantly, ask about things I didn't know, and generally beg to be shut off. I'm happy to report that none of these things have happened - it's been a really pleasant experience over all.
Aardvark compares to other crowd-sourcing question services like ChaCha, and differs mostly in business model and input device. While ChaCha's answers are provided by (under?)paid web surfers, Aardvark's community is opt-in volunteers. ChaCha might get you a quicker response, but the Aardvark response to a similar question might be more accurate and so far doesn't contain any advertising. Aardvark currently doesn't support text message either, and so is only open to IM and email users.
Aardvark is currently in a closed beta period, but you can get on the beta users list by signing up on their homepage. I currently have 19 invites - let me know in the comments if you'd like one.
UPDATE - 14 invites left! In your comment, please also let me know 3 topics you know about, as part of the invite process is listing 3 things I trust your opinion on.
UPDATE - I'm all out of invites! If you're interested in trying Aardvark, please still add a comment and I'll send you one as soon as I get more invites from the Aardvark team.
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