1. I had the same basic response to Raz’s “what’s in it for me?” as you did, although since I’d already read your response, mine was much less vehement. :) As a librarian, I have no trouble imagining why some people might want to help others find answers. As a net-gen-er (who’s testing out another term for my millennial status), I can also imagine putting out good vibes on the internet and expecting my useful answer karma to reap future rewards (either for myself or my friends/network).

2. Recent interactions with my local IT department have led me to believe that your Thought #2 might pretty prevalent among the business/baby boomer set.

3. I feel like twitter is already useful for me in the way that Aardvark wants to be useful to people. Here’s an example of a network-enabled reference question referral that happened in my twitter feed today:

my best friend from home, emily–
egrecque ask a librarian: @katiedt, where can I find some user-friendly info on fair use?

my call for additional help within the hour, on the way out the door to a meeting–
katiedt RT @g_gerg @mollyali & other fair users: @egrecque ask a librarian: @katiedt, where can I find some user-friendly info on fair use?

molly’s response to me within minutes–
mollyali @katiedt My go-to resource is http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

my forward to emily when I returned from my meeting–
katiedt Thanks RT @mollyali: My go-to resource is http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ @egrecque

emily’s thanks when she got back on twitter later–
egrecque thanks, @katiedt, @mollyali

The success of this strategy might depend on the type of people in a particular twitter community — for instance, there are a lot of information professionals among my followed/followers who seem to be predisposed to answering questions via twitter.

This example from earlier today was actually the first time I’ve done this sort of referral; I think it could have gone even better if I hadn’t been rushed to head out to my meeting when I was posting my retweet of Emily’s question (all the @ replies got a little confusing — if my structure had been simpler, Molly might have replied directly to Emily). In the past, I have answered other folks’ questions on twitter, but I’ve never used the RT function to bring other librarians into a reference question thread. The benefit of this method is that if people take advantage of the social norms of retweeting (appending the newly mentioned user with the @ symbol), everyone can follow an answer back to its source.

Could it be that this people-smart method of answering questions via referral allows us more source authority than the machine-smart method Aardvark uses? My gut says yes. But again, your network may vary.

Also, if I wanted an immediate response, I would probably… go ask a librarian.