"Aardvark was the sixth idea that we tried..." | Hacker News Reader

"Aardvark was the sixth idea that we tried..."

ventilla.posterous.com

54 pointszain10 comments

Does someone know how did Aardvark got its first 10.000 users? How did it got traction?

I got spammed by them on a number of occasions. I don't know how they got my address, I sure didn't give it to them.

"Hi [name],

My name is [name] - I'm the community manager at Aardvark. Aardvark is a new social search service that finds the perfect person to answer any question.

We launched our new website (http://vark.com) a few weeks ago. One of our engineers, [name], just wrote a great blog post about how we use AJAX in our new site, and I thought you'd find it interesting.

Check it out here: http://blog.vark.com/?p=xxx

We periodically send out updates about Aardvark to bloggers and journalists who are interested in what we're up to -- if you'd like, I'm happy to include you on the list.

Best, [name]"

There is an email address visible in your HN profile, so there's an outside chance it could be through here.

Nah, this was to my personal address.

Do they have 10,000 users? (Genuine question). Quantcast says they get under 2k users a month.

They had 90.000 users in October 2009: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-fo...

I'm a regular Aardvark user and I never go to the vark.com website...so it wouldn't surprise me that their Quantcast stats are very low.

ah that would explain it, I guess it's like loopt.com

What did Aardvark do?

Aardvark was a Q&A service that used the social graph to route your questions to the people who could answer them best. The main UI was an IM bot you put on your buddy list. You could ask it questions, and it would periodically ask questions of you.

It's like a crowdsourced ChaCha, if you know what ChaCha is.

Broadly speaking it fit into the current "social Q&A" trend which includes startups like Hunch and Quora.

From my experience, the product started off great but quickly lost its use. I really was a big fan: I'm actually wearing my Aardvark shirt right now.

In the beginning I could get answers to all sorts questions for which Google was useless, e.g., "Does anyone know any research about X & Y topics?"

But over time I stopped getting good answers. Often the answer was "just Google it," which made me was to punch the answerer in the face.

On the other side of the equation, the questions that were routed to me became less and less interesting, eventually devolving to things like "How do I set up Wordpress?" or "What is the solution to <trivial homework problem>?" It was really lame and I had to remove the bot from my buddy list to stop getting unwanted IM interruptions.

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