As I wrote previously, I really like the idea behind Aardvark (previously known as Mechanical Zoo) and it’s a great social Q&A tool, but it simply is not “social search” (and unlike TechCrunch, RWW realize that). The Aardvark team still pushes with that terminology, I guess for a good reason given the financial climate, and disperses more of it in a white paper. Once they actually start searching in their aggregated Q&A repository to provide you with an available answer without bothering your network – that would become more of a search solution, rather than Q&A.
Having played with the product a bit, I also see an inherent flaw in the social premise here. Aardvark provides me with answers from friends, or friends-of-friends. Now, it’s more likely I’ll get answers from friends-of-friends, as there are simply a lot more of them. However, these would be people who don’t know me, and will not provide a personal answer that is tailored to my own individual needs.
Still, it’s a great way to make new friends. Not kidding – Aardvark strongly drives conversations, as Danny Sullivan also pointed out, and since this friend-of-friend was the one who responded to my question, I’d feel more comfortable discussing further. Presumably Aardvark will also track this, and practically add this person to my direct social graph.
Update: Max Ventilla of Aardvark commented in my previous post that indexing your graph and finding the right person to answer your query has, in fact, the ingredients of social search. He has a point there, but still that search ends in finding a person, not information, so it’s more of a people search. Still, I agree that in executing this task, the varkers face similar difficulties to those we faced in Delver, albeir on much smaller scale.
The Alter Egozi 