Get Answers, then Get on with Things

There are so many answer websites out there that it can be hard to decide which one is going to give you the information you need. You have Yahoo! Answers, wikiAnswers, Answers.com and on and on. One service that has been flying under the radar but that has a very dedicated community of answerers, myself included, is Aardvark.

When you sign up for Aardvark you tell it what kinds of questions you would like to answer.  This is where the networking aspect of Aardvark is played out.  Each member is considered knowledgeable on a set of topics that they have chosen.  When someone ask a question, only members who are familiar with the topics are presented the question to answer.  That keep people answering questions they feel they know something about and giving you direct access to a network that can help you.

Because of the directed approach to matching questions with the right answerers, Aardvark can return results extremely fast.  They claim that most answers come within 5 minutes of the question being asked and then vast majority of the rest are answered in under 10 minutes.  These times depend on how many people in your network are on and answering questions, but the fact that you can expect to get an answer to you question from someone who knows their stuff in under 5 minutes is pretty astounding not to mention very valuable.

You can ask for tips, recommendations, research questions advice, etc., and expect to get answers you can more or less trust to be accurate or at least get you started in the right direction.

So what makes Aardvark really stand out?  Well, if you have been around here for a while you know that one feature to any service that puts it into another level in my book is an iPhone app.  Aardvark has a great iPhone app.  You can log in and Aardvark will immediately let you ask a question.  When it gets the answer it emails it to you as well as displays it in the app.  It also gives you questions to answer based on what you know.  It is actually pretty fun to get on every once in a while and answer some questions.  You will be exercising your brain and helping someone out at the same time.  Hey, you know this stuff, and it is always fun to talk about what you know.

When you combine the iPhone app with their newly re-designed website at Vark.com, you have a formula for a very compelling questions answering service.  Check it out, get your question answered and then get back to work.

Filed under: iPhone, Productivity

SAY GOODBYE TO TRADITIONAL EMAIL

Email has literally changed the way we communicate with the people in our network.  Sure we have Facebook, Twitter, and more IM accounts than we know what to do with, but email, that ability to essentially take the old pen and paper message model and make it almost instantaneous and available anywhere you have a connection to the internet, was truly a revolution.

However, that revolution was thought up around 40 years ago, and the people who invented the system and principles by which email would primarily stick to through the birth of the internet.  Sure we have our IMAP and POP3 and folders and flags and all the rest, but the foundation still lives.

This foundation, which actually parallels the way snail mail worked, makes sense because it is the way we have been sending and receiving information since the ancient Persian king Cyrus the Great thought it up back in 550 BC.  Sure that statement doesn’t account for the many great advances we have made over the least 2,500 years, but it leads to the point that maybe, just maybe, email or communication would looks somewhat different were it invented today, with all we know about how the internet can work for us.

So, Google has sought out to look into this idea of a better email.  The guys who developed Google Maps have been going after this problem for the last two years and from what I can see they have a very interesting spin to put on communication via the web.

It should be a goal of anyone who wishes to manage their time optimize their resources to spend less time reading emails and more time acting on what they have learned.  Its more about performing the task than it is about reading the assignment.  The problem with the way email works today is that, like traditional mail, you send block of text to a user and that block is un-editable once it leaves your house, machine, phone, or whatever.  Not only that, but if new information comes into the equation, it is difficult to relay that knowledge before the receiver has already sent you back their static response.

If we have learned anything about IM, Twitter, message boards and the like it is that conversations work the best when they are both instant and dynamic.

Instant meaning that there is no delay between the sending and the receiving, and dynamic meaning comments are easily changed, supported, updated, correlated, cited, and decoded in real time by one or more users.  These two factors help virtual communication approach face-to-face communication.

Google has just announced their new product, set to launch later this year, called Google Wave.

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.

Take the time to watch the demo portion of this video to see these sorts of ideas in action.  The video is long, last 2/3 of the video are more for the developer types in the audience.  Wave may not be the answer, but it validates the question of whether or not email as it exists today, is really what billions of people should be relying on for their communication needs.  Food for thought if nothing else.

Filed under: Focus, Productivity, Email, Facebook, Google, Google Wave, IM, Productivity, Social Networks, Twitter, Wave