

The Killings Continue At Google: Aardvark Put Down - ukdm
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/02/google-kills-aardvark/

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crux
Aardvark was truly great when it first started. I was an early adopter, got
the t-shirt, and received and shared a lot of great information. It's sad to
see it go, but I checked out a long time ago. Maybe it was a question of
incentives, but at a certain point the whole thing tipped and after that point
nearly every answer I got was some combination of poorly punctuated, flippant,
ignorant, or willfully spiteful. At the same time the question pool became
very thin, and I started receiving a half-dozen let-google-that-for-you
queries a day.

Really neat t-shirt, though.

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wccrawford
"Over this time, we learned a lot about creating and maintaining online
communities, and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people."

Except, you know, the whole 'real name' debacle.

~~~
shithead
Nothing good is going to come out of Google's obsession with "social".

It's a fool's errand that may end up costing them the company. If they
succeed, they become what, fuckbook with coupons? And move on to organizing
the world's stupidity into neat little crap piles, perhaps.

Way for allegedly smart guys to microsoft themselves.

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phuff
Aardvark has never been totally awesome to the point where I would use it to
ask questions myself, but it has done a really good job sending me IM's asking
me questions that are really relevant to things I'm reasonably well read on.

I think it was a really neat idea, kinda sad to see it go, even though it's
kind of been a wasteland since the acquisition. Which I guess is what the
Google acquisitions mostly have been lately, "talent acquisitions" rather than
"we want to get into this business" acquisitions.

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tsotha
We use some Google tools where I work. I'm always afraid the Goog will lose
interest and send us scrambling to find some other way to do what we're doing.

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erikb
Google is really impressing. I never expected such a great company can change
their direction so fast and drastically as Google does since they have their
Wartime CEO making the decisions.

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jdp23
When Google+ first came out, there was code that seemed to imply an upcoming
"Google Questions". I was assuming it would be based on Aardvark ...
apparently not.

