Latitude

People are Essential for Improved Information Access

There are platforms which connect people to information, and those which connect people to people.

From “In Search of a Community That Takes ‘Me’ Out of Social Media” by Dan Schultz

Increasingly, the endpoints of “people” and “information” are converging. (Some “people” services, like Twitter, can get you to either destination depending on how you opt to use them, and life-streaming platforms have effectively become socially-based recommendation engines.)

In recent studies probing the nature of innovation and information psychology, Latitude examined a wide variety of ventures which address the ever-more-relevant issues of information access and organization; more than half of these innovations viewed people as integral to improving the quantity, quality, and accessibility of information.

Aardvark: “The Real-Time Web of People”

Aardvark, recently named ReadWriteWeb’s “Best LittleCo of 2009,” allows a user to ask any question, then searches “the real-time Web of people” according to users’ self-selected knowledge tags. Its bot then utilizes iPhone push notifications, Web, email, or Twitter to mediate conversations efficiently between mutually relevant individuals.

Aardvark appeals to the “know-it-all”–or, rather, the “know-a-lot-about-a-little,” in all of us; the engagement element is easy.

The Internet has been celebrated for the wonder of bringing vast oceans of content right to our fingertips. Then we interjected the value of social recommendations with the rise of the blog–and services like Yelp.

And now with real-time people connectivity, I needn’t rely on my desired answer to already exist, or worry about sifting through vast oceans of content to find it… or find just the right person to ask, in the event I can’t find what I’m looking for. Aardvark is a real-time people search engine for targeted queries.

People as Information: Functional Transiency

The curious thing about Aardvark is that its design actually precludes people from forming long-term connections (unlike, say, Twitter). I’m not going to “follow” the 24 year old female from Boston who told me where to take good, relatively inexpensive Italian classes around my neighborhood; I’m going to thank her, and we’ll both fade back into the ether, until we form transient connections with others in the name of good-will information exchange.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Header image courtesy of scobleizer’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.