This week I started playing a lot with Aardvark (www.vark.com), a "social search" service that Google just acquired.
If you can get past the horrible captcha thing when you register, it's actually a cool simple service. Unlike other social network tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, it only shows your questions to people who have registered as experts on the subject. But like those services, you can create a network of friends and can see their questions. What I appreciate is the simple way it integrates with IM, email, and (soon) SMS, and it's very good about not over bugging you. Walking that tight rope with a tool like this is not easy. It's not the best place for asking complex questions, but if you want, say, a suggestion on a quick tool or restaurant, you can get great feedback from an "expert" (and I use that term loosely) within just a few minutes. I've been asking "the ether" all sorts of questions about Sao Paulo and have gotten all sorts of great feedback. I am guessing that this sort of feature will soon be integrated with other social networking sites. Here is a paper on social search presented at the same www conference as Google a few years before http://blog.vark.com/?p=352 If anyone else here in the group plays with it, I'd be curious about how it works (or doesn't work) for you. Add me as a friend, if you want....
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