Advance aardvark questions

Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 24 September, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Web 2.0, social media, software |

Aardvark is a fantastic system. I have been a user since its early days and I guess I have been helping people around the world almost on a daily basis. Aardvark is a system that allows users to ask questions on their favourite instant messenger and it discovers the perfect person to help with any question.

However, a question is not always answerable just by writing a line in an instant messenger. For example, “Should I accept a job offer in a large bank in NYC?” or “how can I increase the performance of my sharepoint server?” Some might argue that these are badly framed questions and others would argue that these are harder questions to answer as compared to “are all apples red?” Whichever the case, there are some pretty tough questions in the world that requires contextual and environmental information in order to be answered.

At the moment, just from my personal experience, aardvark is extremely powerful to answer simple questions and mid level questions. However, the more advance questions doesn’t seem to be answered as efficiently. It could be because there are lesser experts in the area or users could not be bothered to go back and forth to clarify, analyse and answer a complex question or the user could just be busy at that point of time.

I think what Aardvark could benefit from advance questions is to build up a paid service where difficult questions could be answered by paying and users with experience in that area has a greater incentive to answer the question. By matching the “buyer” and “seller”, both parties benefits and aardvark could take a cut of the price and make some money.

What do you think?

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