A friend of mine invited me to Aardvark a couple days ago.

It’s an interesting concept — in all the recent companies I’ve worked for, there’s been a “spam” alias that most of the employees subscribe to. People submit questions that google can’t answer — like “I need a good tax accountant in San Mateo,” or “Anyone know of a good chiropractor in the city?,” or “Where’s a good place to go and have fun in Napa?” — and the answers are always interesting.

Aardvark is smart-filtered crowd-sourcing — they don’t spam the world with each question, but only those people in the “great spam brain” that had expertise or interest would be queried. It’s pretty slick.

The only thing that Aardvark misses is the idle spectator benefits — there’s serendipity that they miss by not letting people seeing all the questions and their answers fly by.

The IM interface also seems a bit bolted on by an engineer. After using it for a couple days, the IM interface gives real-time interaction with answerers, though, and results in faster results to the question. Geeks may not mind using a cheat sheet to get Aardvark to do their bidding, but it seems like it would be an easier and more intuitive user interaction if they had a web interface to ask questions and submit answers, too.