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Comment by ashishk | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.

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I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.

If you ask an interesting, detailed question, you'll usually get something unique in return.

An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted: http://vark.com/t/cad4a0

You thought that was an awesome answer? IMHO the top Google result for the search "Borges where to start" gives a better one.

Like many social networking features, I don't get this one. I sorta-know what my friends know - I am more interested in stuff my friends don't know.

It's not just limited to your friends. I have a fairly small network on vark (~8 people I think), but I think only 1 time have I actually gotten a question from one of my friends. It extends to friends of friends and even just random people if it doesn't think your friends know or they choose not to answer.

I've also never actually gotten a question from a friend.

Why not Yahoo Answers? I have used it and gotten pretty satisfactory answers thus far. Infact, I posed your exact same question on Y A now and I already have an answer. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9D...

It's good with niche questions that only a human could help with. I've had luck with social questions ("where's the yscraper located?") and tech questions ("why's my jscript [code here] breaking in IE6?"). It's like stackoverflow, but "real-time" and not limited to coding questions only.

like Yahoo! Answers?

Yes, but instead of waiting for a response, the answer arrives in your IM window seconds later

And, Yahoo Answers has some of the poorest questions and answers on the Internet. The only site that is worse is Experts Exchange.

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