Aardvark, a social search service, launched by former google employees helps you get answers from your social network friends. Think of it as yahoo answers meets fecebook.
Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts (and their contacts) based on what they say they have knowledge of. If you ask taste related questions about music, books, movies, restaurants, etc., they’ll ask people who tend to show similar tastes as you in their profile.
There are many startups trying to offer search personalized by your social graph. Google has also identified social search as an important piece to the search puzzle. Twitter could be one source of future social realtime search solution.
I am not sold on this idea. It is true that my friends will be more likely to respond to my questions, but they are not the best people to answer for most questions I may have. The size of the friends networks are also not large enough to bring in the wisdom of CROWDS effect. It is not necessary that I know the people that can give me best answers.
The other issue I see is that social search is a feature that should be part of other sites not a standalone site. LinkedIn answers is a good example of this. Facebook should also do something similar. It is common for people to tweet questions to get answers from their followers on twitter.