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Living in the Cloud

Post details: Need a quick answer? Ask a friend (or a complete stranger)

07/06/2010

Need a quick answer? Ask a friend (or a complete stranger)

You may already know about the blessings of the Web 2.0: It's interactive. Reading was yesterday (actually last century), searching (or "googling" as this is now a word in the dictionary) was still yesterday because it's sometimes hard to find a good search phrase that gives you the results that you need. So what's actually the next step?

People are now asking around to find their answers. This was possible before if you could manage to find an online forum that was dedicated to your subject of knowledge (computer software for example), but it's still hard to find a good forum in the first place.

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Nowadays people are just "asking the cloud" which means they just blurt out their question "somewhere" on the internet. And this "somewhere" was twitter for quite a while. You may get some good results if you just ask around like "what's the best fish restaurant in Berlin/Germany?" If you are lucky, you have some followers who can give you a good recommendation.

But now, this sort of asking around have found it's own Web 2.0 tool and it's called "Aardvark". You can check it out at http://vark.com/ and if you have created your free account, you can post any question here. Aardvark will give it a label that specifies the domain of knowledge like Facebook, Google Apps, Programming or WordPress.
Questions will be passed to other people who have entered their favorite topics of knowledge so that aardvark knows who might be the best candidate to answer them. You can opt in to get these via IM or e-mail but you can also browse to the aardvark homepage to get a selection of 15 questions that you can check out and reply to some of them if you think you have a good answer for them.

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Shortly after aardvark started their service they had been aquired by Google in Februaray 2010 for $50 million because it's such an excellent concept that it really fits well into the Google concept. So, even as aardvark has started as an independent Web 2.0 project, it's now part of the Googleverse.