The Killings Continue At Google: Aardvark Put Down

Aardvark was truly great when it first started. I was an early adopter, got the t-shirt, and received and shared a lot of great information. It's sad to see it go, but I checked out a long time ago. Maybe it was a question of incentives, but at a certain point the whole thing tipped and after that point nearly every answer I got was some combination of poorly punctuated, flippant, ignorant, or willfully spiteful. At the same time the question pool became very thin, and I started receiving a half-dozen let-google-that-for-you queries a day.

Really neat t-shirt, though.

"Over this time, we learned a lot about creating and maintaining online communities, and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people."

Except, you know, the whole 'real name' debacle.

Aardvark has never been totally awesome to the point where I would use it to ask questions myself, but it has done a really good job sending me IM's asking me questions that are really relevant to things I'm reasonably well read on.

I think it was a really neat idea, kinda sad to see it go, even though it's kind of been a wasteland since the acquisition. Which I guess is what the Google acquisitions mostly have been lately, "talent acquisitions" rather than "we want to get into this business" acquisitions.

We use some Google tools where I work. I'm always afraid the Goog will lose interest and send us scrambling to find some other way to do what we're doing.

Google is really impressing. I never expected such a great company can change their direction so fast and drastically as Google does since they have their Wartime CEO making the decisions.

When Google+ first came out, there was code that seemed to imply an upcoming "Google Questions". I was assuming it would be based on Aardvark ... apparently not.