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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Hunch is basically a diagnostic type site. So you say you want a computer...and it gives you 20 questions with each question narrowing down your solution. Do you want a laptop or netbook? Do you want it in black or red or blue? etc.

Quora is basically a regular Q&A site mixed with twitter and Facebook. So you can follow a topic or a question etc. Personally I found it a bit confusing.

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> Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Au contraire, Aardvark was built so you wouldn't have to spam your friends. Each user of Aardvark puts his field of expertise in his settings and only receive questions Aardvark AI thinks a user can answer and it gets better with time. It's really brilliant, and it doesn't ask your friends only, it asks anyone in the community that may be able to answer your question. It's a fast way (by IM, twitter, email etc ) to ask and get answers without bothering people who don't know anything about your question.

Disclaimer: I don't work neither for Vark nor for Google. But I think it's a great service.

You nailed the concept but the execution was soft. They didn't have enough information on their users to do this well. They knew I was interested in 'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in expertise I had in each, for example.

> They knew I was interested in 'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in expertise I had in each, for example.

Me too, but then I replaced 'software engineering' with the language I really know and I now I can answer most questions I get.

Exactly. Also, if you're a professional software developer, even your resume isn't a good description of what you are an expert on, so their one line description isn't adequate.

If I say I'm an expert on "linux", that could mean linux kernel code, the LAMP stack, or administration and then I get questions like "why do I not get sound out of my netbook on Ubuntu 9.10?"

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