Aardvark Mobile is an iPhone app version of the Aardvark social networking project.
The idea behind Aardvark is that you might not be able to find everything you want to know on Google. With Aardvark you can ask a tagged question and it will be referred to another member of the Aardvark community that has tagged themselves as knowledgeable in the subjects that relate to your question.
In this reviewing this app, it has been difficult for me to distinguish clearly between the my impressions of the Aardvark service and the application itself. Therefore, I have included both.
On the face of it, Aardvark provides a pretty good service. The idea that you might be able to access human being specific local knowledge via the Internet is beguiling. In practice, however, I have had mixed results.
The first question I asked was whether or not there are many users in Cape Town, my home town. That question has remained unanswered since October 2009, which gives one the impression of screaming into the void.
Other test questions that I have asked received a better response. I got many helpful answers to the question of where one can fine a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi in my city.
On the other hand, more specific questions are often answered from a position of complete ignorance by other users. For example, I posed a question that was tagged with gardening and Cape Town about the bioluminescence of our local earthworms. Many Cape Town gardeners have encountered this phenomenon and information about it can easily be located using Google. From Aardvark I received two responses that openly mocked the question, and one confirmation that the phenomenon exists.
It may seem petty to bring this up but such a question is a good test of the knowledge that is available through the system. Either you know about glowing earthworms, or you don’t. In this instance, two thirds of my answers came from users who obviously had no idea about the subject under discussion but decided to offer their two cents worth anyway. From this we must deduce that, either through defects in the tagging system or in the way in which questions are distributed to other users, the information received from Aardvark is unreliable at best.
I also found that, when answering questions, many of the original posters would follow on with a more detailed question, or questions about the answer I provided. It feels a bit like one is deluged with iPhone notification spam from Aardvark whenever you do anything. For busy people, this might not be ideal.
The app itself doesn’t impress either. The opening screen lists all questions that you have asked or answered. The order, however, is confusing. Questions always seem to be listed in the order that they were posed, whereas ordering them by most recent activity seems more logical to me.
This is especially true considering the fact that Aardvark Mobile uses iPhone notifications to let you know when a question has been answered. This means that you have to unlock your phone, open Aardvark Mobile, and then hunt for the question that was referenced in the notification before opening it and seeing what was said.
Aardvark Mobile also provides a feature that allows you to delete old conversations from the list. This doesn’t work properly. I found that I had to delete conversations twice before they disappeared.
The answering mechanism works quite well, and Aardvark also provides an interface to Facebook, which could be quite interesting. On the whole, though, my impressions were not favourable and I would not recommend this one unless you have a lot of time, and patience.
Aardvark Mobile gets two stars. One because that is the minimum rating, and another because the idea is interesting, even if the implementation is shoddy and the other users are irritating.
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Andrew, thanks for reviewing Aardvark! Your feedback was very helpful. Our mobile team is working hard on updates to the app and I will definitely make sure they see your comments. We're also constantly working to improve our process of tagging and sending questions to people, so you will only see this get better. I'd love to hear any other feedback that you or your readers have – alison@aardvarkteam.com
- Alison @ Aardvark