Sometimes, asking  Google for information just doesn’t cut it. What do you do when you have a question and you need to ask a real person? Calling Mom may be your first choice, but what if you need to know about smartphones and your mom refers to your Blackberry as “that Blueberry phone?”

Aardvark is a cool service that connects you to friends or friends-of-friends to get answers to your questions. Here’s how it works-you ask a question, and Aardvark IM’s everyone in your network who has agreed to answer questions about your topic. They respond back via IM, and your question gets answered by someone who (hopefully) knows what they are talking about. If you don’t like the answer you receive, you can always re-submit.

Aardvark has two big advantages over services like Yahoo Answers. First, since your question is sent out by IM, you can get a quick response-my first question was answered in about 20 minutes. Second, the quality of the answers seems to be a lot better.

Possibly because you are dealing with friends of friends of friends instead of random strangers, people seem more likely to think before they answer your questions. Not that it’s impossible to get a good answer from a site like Yahoo Answers…but a lot of people on that site (and other similar Q and A sites) seem to enjoy typing just to see themselves type, even if all they can come up with is “I don’t know” or just some snarky comment that doesn’t answer the question at all.

There are plenty of other sites out there that aim to connect people with questions to people with answers. What makes Aardvark stand out is the method of delivery (via IM) and the quality of the information you get back. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and you can integrate Aardvark with your Twitter account if you prefer Twitter to IM.

Once the get the hang of using it, Aardvark is an extremely useful way to get help from knowledgeable people when you have a question.

What do you think of Aardvark? And where is your favorite place to go to get a question answered online?

Our Rating of Aardvark

Tags: Advice

Categories:social