Ever since we wrote about Mosio in October of 2007 we’ve been watching and waiting for someone to really break-through with a human-powered mobile search utility that can archive scale. ChaCha and kgb to varying degrees have done that and represent a hybrid between traditional directory assistance and Web search; one can ask any question of a quasi-professional human in the background, while some query responses are automated via a database.
Yahoo! Answers uses community to answer questions but answers don’t show up in real time; although Yahoo!’s Marc Davis has told me that increasingly there are responses in near-real time from the community.
Twitter and Facebook have the potential to evolve or develop angles that enable them to be used as Q&A services — what I’ve called in the past “social DA.” But those use cases are not fully developed on either site.
Now Aardvark, which we can call an “answer community,” is trying to bring all these things together.
The rest of this post is on LMS.
Screenwerk 
June 29, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Thanks for the writeup on Aardvark! I’d love to hear any feedback that you or your users have–feedback@vark.com
– Alison @ Aardvark
http://blog.vark.com
http://facebook.com/aardvark
June 30, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I never found Aardvark very useful and stopped using it (too many completely random questions about rock climbing, business cards etc). HOWEVER, it is a service driven by the user community so it’s not surprising that the service was lacking when it was only in private beta. It is a great idea, and if they can get the right momentum and enough people join it will be successful.