Social Computing

Image via CrunchBase

Aardvark has released its white paper paper "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine" and it’s a good read. I’ve used Vark for a while — mostly answering questions through its SMS interface.

Their iPhone app is well done but I don’t tend to proactively search its database or topics to seek out questions to answer. I also use Hunch sparingly and have signed up for Quora but haven’t seen its offering yet. I think it’s interesting to think about the possibilities of Aardvark and other geo-location apps.

As people check-in to venues, invariably there’s a slew of questions that Vark’ers could answer about purchasing products, menu selections, etc.. Social search is some respects, the new, new word-of-mouth.

87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.

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