DIIA Blog

As the social networking scene continues to explode, developers are increasingly finding novel ways to use services such as Facebook and Twitter. Through the Facebook Connect technology, the developers of a web app called Aardvark seem to be onto something. Their service basically crowd sources your contacts and contacts of contacts in Facebook to help answer any question you may have. Any question. So how good would this be for students? Probably pretty good unless you are taking a test, in which case asking the Vark might not be a good idea.

For getting answers to questions stumping you, you can submit your question to Aardvark which is then interpreted by the system’s artificial intelligence system. It then sends the message out to people in your extended social network who might be able to answer your question. The question is sent out anonymously and the replies back are as well (as far as I can tell), so no question is too ridiculous. Your identity should not be revealed. A average response time is about 5 minutes. And of course an iPhone app was just released. This is an intriguing application that will be interesting to see how it matures, especially in higher education circles.

Keene

Tags: education, social media, social_web, web apps

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under education, social web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.