

"Aardvark was the sixth idea that we tried..." - zain
http://ventilla.posterous.com/hello-world-2603

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mcxx
Does someone know how did Aardvark got its first 10.000 users? How did it got
traction?

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axod
Do they _have_ 10,000 users? (Genuine question). Quantcast says they get under
2k users a month.

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emmett
I'm a regular Aardvark user and I never go to the vark.com website...so it
wouldn't surprise me that their Quantcast stats are very low.

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axod
ah that would explain it, I guess it's like loopt.com

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Tichy
What did Aardvark do?

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jfarmer
Aardvark was a Q&A service that used the social graph to route your questions
to the people who could answer them best. The main UI was an IM bot you put on
your buddy list. You could ask it questions, and it would periodically ask
questions of you.

It's like a crowdsourced ChaCha, if you know what ChaCha is.

Broadly speaking it fit into the current "social Q&A" trend which includes
startups like Hunch and Quora.

From my experience, the product started off great but quickly lost its use. I
really was a big fan: I'm actually wearing my Aardvark shirt right now.

In the beginning I could get answers to all sorts questions for which Google
was useless, e.g., "Does anyone know any research about X & Y topics?"

But over time I stopped getting good answers. Often the answer was "just
Google it," which made me was to punch the answerer in the face.

On the other side of the equation, the questions that were routed to me became
less and less interesting, eventually devolving to things like "How do I set
up Wordpress?" or "What is the solution to <trivial homework problem>?" It was
really lame and I had to remove the bot from my buddy list to stop getting
unwanted IM interruptions.

