Aardvark

I recommend trying this service. If you have an iphone give their mobile app a try if you are interested.


Quick Summary
The main idea behind Aardvark is a search engine with answers provided by humans. You can "ask" a question by typing it into their website or using your iphone application. The questions are then answered by people with relevant experience or knowledge. By creating an account you can start asking and answering questions. The website provides a good way to get appropriate answers to questions that can't be easily searched for. This is a great way of creating community crowd-sourcing.

Things I Like

• Great way to get crowd-sourced, appropriate answers to a question. 
• Easy to use interface. 
• Easy to configure how you want to interact with the site, how you want it to contact you, and your profile. 
• Easy integration with facebook.

Things I Don't Like

• IM Commands page is wayyyy to complicated for me to even considering trying to memorize and use. I'd rather interact with the site through their website or my phone.
• No Android application, only iPhone. (Where's the love?)
• No way to easily browsed asked questions to see if your question has already been answered. 

Sign Up Process
To initially ask a question on their website you need to have an account.
If you want to sign up for an account and join their site you can do so by either creating an account with the site or you can do it by joining using fbConnect.
I tried the fbConnect method and it seemed to work fine. The site pulled in information from my profile to help diagnose my "expertise" on certain topics. You can then fine tune that information to help make it more appropriate.
Once logged in, you have a dashboard type system.

Using the System
When you are logged in you can see along the top of the screen the following options: Home, Profile, History, Network, Share Aardvark!, Help, and Sign Out.

• Under Profile you can adjust your topics (things you know a lot about), settings (how much you want to be contacted, when to contact you, etc...), Nametag and Photo, IM & Email & Twitter addresses, and iPhone (if you have one you can download their application).
• Under History you can see Questions You've Asked, Answers You've Given, Referrals You've Sent. Pretty straight forward. 
• Under Network you can access Entire Network, Friends, and Friends-of-friends. Essentially it took my facebook networks (like berkeley, san diego) and ported them over. My friends were made of FB friends.
• When you click on Share Aardvark it brings up a page that allows you to send messages to friend through your email, twitter, facebook. This is pretty standard. 
• Under Help you see FAQ, Enabling IM, IM Commands, Tips and Etiquette, and Community. Under the FAQ you can be told how the site got its name, how it works, so on and so on. IM Commands gives you a page of commands you can use to interact with the site. Tips and etiquette are a good way to get an explanation on how to interact with the community.

Along the bottom of the website is a menu that allows access to all the items in the top menu, except that it is expanded at all times.

That is a breakdown of the features of the site.