The company has raised millions of dollars in venture capital, at a very high valuation, and is rumored to be in a nasty spat behind the scenes with Facebook leadership. It's also been a great place to get inside dirt on Silicon Valley startups. Ready to take a peak inside? The site is open to new users today.

ReadWriteWeb posted the first screenshots of the service in January, but Quora has been subject of intense press scrutiny ever since - while remaining accessible only through a loose invitation system.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself is developing a Q&A system and is rumored to be engaged in a back-and-forth war of IP blocking between its employees and Quora's. We've heard that there's more animosity than that going on behind the scenes as well.

Meanwhile, Quora has remained a small site building itself to ensure scalability when this time finally came. Public launch day was marked by a very nice write-up in the Wall St. Journal. Quora is a good little site, but it's hard not to wonder if the hype, funding and press coverage is warranted given the traction-to-pedigree ratio.

Those of us who have enjoyed using it among a select group of early adopters may find the new public Quora to be a different animal. That's certainly what happened when the marginally-related Aardvark went from red-hot to Google acquired to uselessly swamped with half-baked questions from the Google-using public. (Sorry, it's true!)

Quora is closely tied in to the Facebook "social graph" of its users, something that may help it avoid Aardvark's fate if if ever gets in front of a large number of people.

Let's see what you've got, Quora.

Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person.

Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites, due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo.

Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says.

Casting The Tasks

Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully.

Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done."

At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work.

The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work.

This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity.

He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business.

These Hands Are Fancy

People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of.

These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience.

There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that.

For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds.

Photo by Justin Ouellette.

A month later, Xander was visiting my house and we gave her a package of balloons. She whipped up a giraffe, a horse and a princess crown in minutes. Her mom asked her how she did it and you know what she said? "The Aardvark taught me how to do it!" Google announced today that it bought the company that made that iPhone app. It feels like some closure on my past year of hunting the story of the Aardvark, both personally and professionally.

Today Google officially announced the acquisition of Aardvark and its availability in Google Labs. I thought I'd take this opportunity to share a few stories about my year following this company and using its service. There's no knowing how much attention the project will get inside Google, so this may be a case of "it was fun while it lasted." But it sure was fun. And perhaps this acquisition won't be the last we hear of Aardvark, after all.

Founded by ex-Google employees, here's how Aardvark describes its team that built the system: "Over 2009, the company built an amazing technical team of over twenty people, including engineers from each of Silicon Valley's major technology companies, four AI Ph.D.s, and founders from a dozen different successful startups." Those people are all Google employees now and have a tidy pile of money.

The price may well be based on the company's failure to find a substantial number of users. Aardvark said earlier this month that it had fewer than 100,000 registered users. So be it. The founders will now return to Google, their former employer, with a powerful proof of concept, an eye for the huge Google user base and several million dollars in each of their pockets. Maybe they'll continue to work on Aardvark itself and maybe they won't. Only time will tell.

In the mean time, I've had a great time using Aardvark and have even put it to work for me professionally.

Last October I was walking down the street in San Francisco after lunch, headed back to the Moscone Center to see what was rumored to be a big announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit. Microsoft was going to announce that it cut a deal with Twitter to include Tweets in Bing search results. The much more connected Kara Swisher broke the news and I was trying to think of how to add value to the conversation with my coverage. So I put out a tweet: "Are there any User Experience experts at Web 2.0 who can talk to me about Bing/Twitter integration?"

By the time I sat down on the floor of the crowded convention hall before the announcement, I hadn't gotten a single reply on Twitter. So I decided to fire up Aardvark. I asked it by IM, "are there any UX pros available right now to give me a live reaction to some news about to break?"

I was quickly delivered 3 suitable User Experience design professionals from around the country, asking me how they could help, through the Aardvark IM interface. I typed, copied and pasted as fast as I could - sending them the link to bing.com/twitter as soon as it was available, getting their thoughts, asking follow-up questions, separating three live interviews in one chat stream (chatting with Aardvark) into three separate interview chunks of text. It was crazy! I typed and thought and parsed as fast as I possibly could and then boom - within minutes of the announcement being over, I had a blog post up. Three User Experience professionals react to the way that the first major search engine to do so integrated the Twitter stream. It was quite a rush and something I couldn't have done in any other way, without Aardvark.

We all knew that Aardvark was born and raised to be sold, probably to Google. When Michael Arrington broke the news 2 months ago that Aardvark was in talks with Google, it wasn't a surprise. Nor was it a surprise that TechCrunch broke the story, Arrington has held an annual summer event at the offices of August Capital, Aardvark's lead investor, for years. He's very connected to the circle of people around Aardvark, as he is with hot Silicon Valley startups quite often.

A few days after that news came out, Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla was a guest on Leo Laporte's show This Week in Tech. I ended up butting in far too much, explaining Vark and telling stories in the TWiT chat room that Leo asked Max about live on the show. I was a little worried that Max was going to get tired of me. I'd been trading emails with him, cursing him for giving exclusives to other media outlets, interviewing him at length for our research report on the future of the Real-Time Web and just generally being a harassing fan and overeager news blogger.

After the show, I shot him an email anyway. I told him that I'm not connected enough to break the news that Aardvark is about to sell, but I'd like to try to out-write my competitors. Just like the New York Times writes obituaries for famous people before they die, I'd like to spend some time with him so I can write the story of Aardvark ahead of time, before it gets acquired.

He told me there was no rush, that nothing was really happening, but agreed to schedule a call. We scheduled some time, but that morning a pipe exploded in the basement of my house. I emailed him and said I'd reschedule sometime soon.

That was two weeks ago. I never got to dive deep into the story of Aardvark, before it got acquired, and now there's no telling what the future will bring for the company. But I did have a great time chasing Aardvark around in my personal and professional life over the last year. I know how to make a mean sweet potato and butternut squash soup thanks to Aardvark, and I'm not afraid to put certain Arm and Hammer products on my carpet to vacuum up, even if they aren't labeled for it explicitly. Thanks, Aardvark community.

These days I haven't been responding to my Aardvark IMs as much as I used to. I used to answer lots of questions, so now I get a lot of questions. Most of them are on topics I have no interest in. I spent the end of last year chasing down the next social search company that caught my fancy, the then-unlaunched Quora, built by some of the very first people to join and leave Facebook in the early days. I posted the first screenshots of Quora and use it regularly still, but as a web technology writer it's my job to be looking for the next new thing.

I still enjoy Aardvark and I love the ideas behind it. We'll see what happens to it at Google, but if absolutely nothing else: my niece and I now know how to make balloon animals. I think that's very cool.

Congrats on your sale, team Vark, and good luck changing the world of search at Google.

Maybe Google is also interested in hiring back some of the engineers that left Google for Aardvark. Among them are Ventilla, who used to focus on "strategy for Google's marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications," co-founder Nathan Still, who was the head of Google News for three years, Javascript specialist Fritz Scheider, and Bill MacCartney, who designed a Q&A system for Google Research before he joined Aardvark.

This is not the first time that we've heard rumors of an Aardvark acquisition, but in the past the deal either fell through or was nothing more than a rumor. Now, however, we have confirmation that Aardvark has indeed signed with Google. We don't expect the companies to disclose the exact price of the acquisition, but we expect to see official statements from both of them soon.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

Location-based Apps - Foursquare: Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March. Since then it has partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users.

iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire: In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app. Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application.

Real-Time Search - Collecta: If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release, which launched in June. In September the company released its API to developers.

Twitter App Discovery - OneForty: Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store," OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy-to-understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage.

Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10

All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access: Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched its much-anticipated $5-per-month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify.

Web TV - Clicker: Launched in mid November, Clicker is considered the TV Guide for Internet television. The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors.

Semantic Search - Evri: Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections.

Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo: While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July. The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions.

Augmented Reality - Layar: ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June. Created by SPRXmobile, the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July, SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd-party applications.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.

Pubsubhubbub

Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook's FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication.

Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it.

RSSCloud

RSSCloud is a technology that's been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience.

RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn't deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress.

The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe, which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall.

Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web's leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management.

Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we'd be fools to not watch what he's doing.

Facebook

Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal.

Google Real-Time Search

Twitter search

Whether you're watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme - millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages.

Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site's new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important - in ways that could change our day-to-day lives.

Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10

Superfeedr

Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today. Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now.

Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year.

Tornado

This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year.

Breaking News Online's iPhone App

It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year.

Aardvark

Cliqset

Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time!

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

Bing

Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. Now, however, thanks to Microsoft's Bing - which launched in July - users finally have a choice when it comes to search engines. Bing's market share climbed steadily over the last few months, and Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search, hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha's most compelling features.

Bing, which bills itself as a "decision engine," tries to give its users more than just 10 links. Instead, Bing focuses on giving users answers right on the search results page. A search for a football or baseball player, for example, will bring up recent stats, while a search for flights brings up data from Microsoft's Bing Travel service.

Wolfram Alpha

No other new web service was greeted with the same amount of hype as Wolfram Alpha this year. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer, but Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. If this sounds familiar, it might be because Microsoft's Bing is trying to do something very similar - even if Microsoft's approach isn't quite as radical. Because of these similarities, it also doesn't come as a surprise that Bing was the first search engine to integrate search results from Wolfram Alpha.

While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too, though not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. We still have to wait and see what the future holds for Wolfram Alpha.

For now, the service is a great experiment and even if it fails (which we don't think it will), its influence will surely extend to other search engines like Bing and Google Search. In the spirit of trying something different, Wolfram also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price.

Google Chrome

Google launched the first beta version of Google Chrome in late 2008. Even though Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, Chrome has already changed the browser market. Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and even Microsoft now compares the performance of the next version of Internet Explorer to Chrome. Thanks to its fast JavaScript rendering engine and interesting new technologies, Chrome is changing the way developers are thinking about browsers. Even if you don't use Chrome, you will see Chrome's influence in the upcoming versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Chrome, of course, is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS, so chances are that we will see a lot more of Chrome in the next year.

Posterous

Whether you want to open up a new blog without any fuzz or just share photos and messages easily on multiple services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, light blogging service Posterous has you covered. The service launched in May 2009 and was definitely one of the most interesting new arrivals in the blogging landscape this year. What makes Posterous stand out is its ability to cross-post updates to other services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, for example). In addition, it's also extremely easy to set up a new blog. Just email a message, photo or video to post AT posterous.com and your new blog is ready to go. Advanced users can also port their own domain names to the service and theme their blogs.

With PicPosterous, the company now also offers an easy to use iPhone app.

Hulu

Thanks to its prominent ads during the Super Bowl, Hulu became a household name in the US this year. Even before this publicity campaign, however, Hulu had already established itself as a the #1 destination for finding episodes of TV shows online. Hulu started out as a joint venture between FOX, NBC and other TV networks. In April, ABC also joined this group. Thanks to this, Hulu now offers one of the only destinations to easily find TV shows online in the US. While Hulu is currently available for free, it's worth noting that Hulu could start charging for subscriptions as early as next year.

Next page: Consumer web apps 6-10

TweetDeck

Except for Twitter's own website, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client. While a few of us here at RWW prefer Seesmic's Twitter application, there can be no doubt that TweetDeck has set the standard for Twitter clients this year. TweetDeck was the first client to popularize a column-based layout - a design feature that a lot of other Twitter clients now use as well.

In its current version (our review), TweetDeck introduced support for Twitter's new lists feature, as well as integration with LinkedIn and partial support for Twitter's new geolocation feature. TweetDeck was also one of the first clients to introduce local lists, a feature that many power users had been clamoring for long before Twitter introduced its own version of this functionality.

Twitter

No Top 10 list of web applications would be complete without mentioning Twitter. No other web service (except for maybe Facebook) has recently managed to capture our imagination to the degree that Twitter has. Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced numerous new features, including lists and integrated search. Twitter's users didn't greet every new feature with complete happiness, however. The new retweet feature, for example, was met with resistance and it's still not clear if it will win out over today's retweet convention that grew organically over the last few years.

Today, there are numerous users on Twitter with more than 1 million followers, and services like BNO News regularly break news reports on Twitter long before the mainstream media. While Twitter has its detractors, there can be little doubt that 2009 was the year when Twitter came of age.

Aardvark

Have you ever found yourself in a city you've never been to and wondered where to find a good place for lunch or dinner or just playing pool? You could go to Yelp or Citysearch, but the best suggestions are likely to come from your own personal network and the friends of your friends. Aardvark makes it possible to harvest this collective knowledge of your extended social network through an easy to use web app, instant messaging bot and iPhone app. Simply ask a question and Aardvark will route your query to one of your friends (or your friend's friends) who is currently online. Thanks to sophisticated machine learning algorithms that run in the background, Aardvark quickly learns who to ask about specific topics.

Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. While we had our doubts about how well this would work when the service first launched, Aardvark has proven it's worth time and again. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered.

Google Voice

Google loves to enter markets where the status quo prevails and turn things on their head. With Google Voice, the search giant is doing just that to the telecom and VoIP industry. Google Voice assigns every user a new phone number that can be forwarded to any phone. Google Voice, which features a Gmail-like user interface, allows its users to make free local and long distance call, as well as cheap international calls from their existing phones. The service also features free text messages, conference calls and automated voicemail transcriptions.

While other services like Ribbit Mobile and VoxOx offer similar features, Google Voice has the name recognition and marketing power behind it to make it an even more important product in the coming year. For now, Google Voice is still an invite-only service, though Google continually sends out additional invites.

Facebook

Over the course of 2009, Facebook continued to grow and added new features which ranged from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams. While it still trailed MySpace in 2009, it became the #1 social network this year, and by September Facebook had passed the 300 million active user mark. The service's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

While Facebook was once the domain of early adopters, today's Facebook population is highly diverse. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook today is users over 35.

Did We Miss Your Favorites?

This list showcases some of the favorite consumer web apps of the RWW team. What are your favorites? What web services do you think made the biggest impact in 2009? Let us know in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

Specifically, some audience members wondered if services like Aardvark need some kind of explicit quality score to give users a better idea how good a certain user's answers typically are, so that they can feel comfortable with the connection they have just made. Currently, while Aardvark looks at some of this data, the company doesn't surface any of this, and Horowitz argued that there really isn't a reason to start doing so. Horowitz argues that Aardvark wants to create an intimate experience and that its users are mostly interested in the quality of the answer they have just received, not the quality of the answers that a user posted before.

Creating a Friendly Atmosphere on the Real-Time Web

In addition, because Aardvark provides a very intimate one-to-one experience, users tend to be rather cordial, and this intimate connection (as well as Aardvark's friendly style of initiating conversations) means that users who do answer questions generally try to give the best possible answer. Internally, Aardvark looks at various signals when deciding which users to connect, including how users reacted to previous answers; though the company doesn't currently surface this data explicitly.

Learning from Dating Sites

Other companies, of course, have faced similar questions before. Online dating services like eHarmony, for example, have worked on matching people for years. Dating services had to find ways to make users comfortable with the decisions they made; and while people took some time to get comfortable with the idea, eHarmony and Match.com are now mainstream services. For now, though, none of these services is connecting people in real time, which might actually open up some new business opportunities for startups.

Companies entering this space will have to expect some initial resistance from users. While they will obviously have to create appropriate interfaces and educate their users, creating a situation in which users can trust the connections these companies initiate for them is one of the most important challenges these new services face.

We offer below one way to think about this broad market. We hope it's useful and interesting.

On the far left we've got services that facilitate human-to-human communication, like Twitter itself, Instant Messaging and a new service called Olark (our review). Olark integrates with your existing instant messenger client to facilitate real-time chat with visitors to a particular page of your website. It's document-centric (another potential axis of analysis) but the value proposition is in direct communication between people.

On the near left we've got services that derive their value through human-to-machine/object-to-human communication. These forms of communication are particularly mediated by technology (though obviously in absolute terms even the human to human examples here are). For example: Aardvark is a service that cross references what you say you know about, what others say you know about, your network of contact networks, everyone's present availability and past performance in answering questions from Aardvark users. The result is a "real-time web of people" accessible through a very intelligent bot that delivers any question you have to the most qualified person socially near you who is available at that moment.

On the near right you'll find machine-to-human systems. These are like real-time robots who do work for you and then notify you immediately when something you're interested in has changed. Notify.me is a white-label real-time alert service (among other things) where the value comes from the machine communicating things to you.

On the far right are machine-to-machine systems. The two examples we have here are entirely theoretical so far. Both come from PubSubhubbub co-creator Brad Fitzpatrick of Google. Fitzpatrick says he imagines a future where PubSubhubbub or some other effective real-time communications protocol is used by services that want to subscribe to stay synced with our social media profiles made available through the WebFinger protocol. He also envisions a future where the entire web may be Hubbub-enabled, allowing Google to simply subscribe for updates whenever they're available from webpages, instead of going out and pro-actively spidering the entire web to index it.

These kinds of machine-to-machine communication can have all kinds of benefits. Fitzpatrick told us, for example, that the early implementation of Pubsubhubbub for shared items in Google Reader helped aggregation services get updates far more efficiently than the old "is there anything new yet?" method of periodic polling. He says, "When we enabled Hubbub [real-time] subscription to Blogger and Google Reader shared items, FriendFeed's traffic to us dropped 85% and latency changed from minutes to seconds."

My theory is that the technologies on the left have traditionally not been a big focus of development but are in this current era being heavily built out. On the right side, however, the financial world and others have traditionally put a lot of resources into machine-to-machine communication - but in this real-time web era, this kind of communication is just beginning to be developed in a lightweight capacity.

We hope you'll join us on Thursday to talk about questions like these. Either in person in Mountain View, California (register now before prices jump on the day of the event!) or right here on ReadWriteWeb, where we'll be live-streaming selected sessions compliments of Justin.tv.

Finally, check out our fabulous event sponsors below. Where would you put them on this continuum? There's all kinds of different ways to discuss and think about the real-time web, and the more clearly we can think about it the better we'll be able to take action and build the web of the future with this important new part of it well-utilized.

We'll see you on Thursday!

Answering questions on the iPhone is also quite easy. Just head to the 'Answer' tab and a new question will pop up. You can customize what kind of questions you would like to answer in your Aardvark profile. If you don't know the answer and want to switch to another question, just shake the phone and Aardvark will look for another one (and make some aardvark noises in the background as well).

To route questions, Aardvark does some pretty sophisticated analysis in the backend to make sure your questions get to those people who can actually answer them. For users, however, all that matters is that questions actually get answered, and this is where Aardvark does a really good job.

One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is, and they are starting companies based on the idea.

The three services we look at are Aardvark, Hunch and Swingly. Unfortunately none of these services are wide open to the public yet. If you go to their sites and request an invite, you should get one soon. You might also try asking around on other networks like Twitter or Facebook; two of the three services discussed below have invites in the wild now.

Aardvark

Premise: Ask any question by IM and your question will be routed to a tagged "expert" on the topic, among your friends and their networks.

Logic: There appears to be some semantic analysis of the tags given users by their friends and themselves, cross referenced with semantic analysis of the questions asked in order to find the right fit. We presume there is or will be some logic judging the history of successful answers from users so as to rank relative expertise.

History of one query.

User experience: High coolness factor when a real person quickly answers your question. How reliable that person is regarding the topic of the question is not readily apparent. Interesting IM interface facilitates relatively sophisticated interactions based on short commands. Fun to browse through open questions; smart deference to email when people aren't available by IM. Can be irritating to be interrupted by other people's questions by IM, but not such a big deal. Web interface is quite nice but I've hardly ever seen it -- just asking and answering questions through IM.

How It Differs From the Others: IM interface offers almost zero barrier to entry and a powerful hook to return to the service over time. Machine learning focuses on identifying human experts, and search is rich with human interaction, thinly mediated by a smart system. You could call this a friend-network-based, semantically powered expert discovery and conversation system.

Stage: Closed beta; new users get 50 invites. Has been in the works for years and is relatively well baked.

Backing: Made up largely of ex-Googlers. The parent company is called The Mechanical Zoo and has raised $6 million from very hip VC firm August Capital and Ron Conway's Baseline Ventures.

For more info, see this review on VentureBeat.

Hunch

Premise: You may like the same advice for common questions that people with similar tastes like.

Logic: A series of decision topics have been populated with questions concerning factors to consider for each decision. Users go through and answer those questions and are then presented with a series of answers that other people who answered the questions the same way and who have similar tastes have said they are happy with. It's hard to explain but really easy to use. Users can add "factors to consider" questions to any question. There's a really interesting social networking component to it as well.

Home page: random questions; taste-profile-building question about you, users.

User experience: Using Hunch is an odd experience, but it's a whole lot of fun once you get it figured out a little bit. Much of the User Experience design is a model that you'll wish every website followed. It's quite game-like. That said, the site can be overwhelming and make your brain hurt. The service tells me that most people who said they think clowns are funny (as I did), and who don't do video editing on their computers, also liked the answer "no, you probably don't need to upgrade your Mac's RAM." I don't really know what to make of that. You'll probably want to go back, though, and you'll probably want to clap your hands and smile each time you do.

How It Differs From the Others: By far the most "involved" for users of these three services. The user experience is very structured but it's also a lot of fun. You could call this a profile-driven, crowd-built recommendation system.

Stage: Closed beta; new users get a very limited number of invites. One co-founder says it's still quite rough around the edges, but if that's the case we sure can't see it.

Backing: The company has raised $2 million in VC funding and has an executive team of successful startup founders who've sold other companies, most prominently Caterina Fake, one of the co-founders of Flickr, who is now Chief Product Officer at Hunch.

To read more about Hunch, see the company's official FAQ.

Swingly

Premise: Answers to any question you have can be found out around the web. Swingly finds those answers hidden in plain text articles, databases and other Q&A sites. Then it makes them structured for easy sorting in response to queries.

Logic: This un-launched company uses Seti@Home-style distributed computing to perform Natural Language Processing on pages all around the web, hunting for information that can be turned into Questions and Answers to serve up to Swingly users. The company believes that "next-gen search should [include] 'micro-retrieval,' rather than return pages, and return only the content (word/sentence/paragraph) you need."

A screen shot from earlier this week.

User experience: We've not been able to test Swingly yet, but it looks relatively straightforward so far. There will be any number of additional services built out as well, including a widget for bloggers to offer Q&A functionality on their sites. When you talk about billions of pieces of structured data that you can query with common questions, almost anything is possible. That said, Q&A is a field that several other companies have done a good job nailing already, from Yahoo Answers to ChaCha to Mahalo.

How It Differs From the Others: Swingly is the most mysterious of the three services and the most likely to become "a platform." It's also the most likely to suffer from the Powerset dilemma: hype, hyper-nerdy ambitions, big expectations, lackluster launch, $100m payday from Microsoft, getting turned into a term of derision among some in the industry and maybe buying a yacht.

Stage: Closed alpha right now. Starting to make the first public rumblings with screen shots, Twitter presence, initial PR outreach. "Alpha coming in late March and a public beta in mid-May. The alpha version will use an index of about 850 million question-answer pairs (more than all the Q&A sites put together) and will only be searchable. The beta release will consist of about 5 billion question-answer pairs and will include full questions and answers plus semantic search capabilities." - CEO Andy Hickl, last month

Backing: Dallas, Texas-based Swingly CEO and founder Andy Hickl is also CEO and President of the very related-looking Language Computer Corporation. CNN calls that company "closely held."

One thing's for sure - we're going to hear a lot more about Swingly. The company is working with Porter Novelli's Josh Dilworth, one of the smartest and most effective PR agents in the tech industry. Dilworth has a history of working with uber-nerd companies and getting them huge media coverage. His recent clients include database super-search engine Wolfram|Alpha (our review) and the most-discussed consumer semantic web company to date, Twine (our most recent coverage).

To follow the unfolding of Swingly, check out Hickl's personal blog.

Those are three companies we'll be watching closely as they break new ground in the combination of social and machine learning online. Which would you be most likely to go to first with a question? We'd love to hear from readers who have thought about this field, who are doing work in it as well, or who have initial impressions about these services that they would like to share. We expect to see a whole lot more like this in the near future.

Title photo Cyborg 2.0 by Y0si CC on Flickr

In the following post we take a look at three of the most exciting startups entering this emerging market. The movement is a logical development now that millions of people are comfortable posting information online. The web's next step is to leverage machine learning. These are three companies to watch who are doing just that - combining user input with technology that improves its performance by gathering and processing data. In this case they are doing it in order to help people make better decisions, but these are just some of the first consumer technologies that will enter the cyborg-like space that combines people and machines in order to better serve people.

Aardvark

Premise: Ask any question by IM and your question will be routed to a tagged "expert" on the topic, among your friends and their networks.

Logic: There appears to be some semantic analysis of the tags given users by their friends and themselves, cross referenced with semantic analysis of the questions asked in order to find the right fit. We presume there is or will be some logic judging the history of successful answers from users so as to rank relative expertise.

History of one query.

User experience: High coolness factor when a real person quickly answers your question. How reliable that person is regarding the topic of the question is not readily apparent. Interesting IM interface facilitates relatively sophisticated interactions based on short commands. Fun to browse through open questions; smart deference to email when people aren't available by IM. Can be irritating to be interrupted by other people's questions by IM, but not such a big deal. Web interface is quite nice but I've hardly ever seen it -- just asking and answering questions through IM.

How It Differs From the Others: IM interface offers almost zero barrier to entry and a powerful hook to return to the service over time. Machine learning focuses on identifying human experts, and search is rich with human interaction, thinly mediated by a smart system. You could call this a friend-network-based, semantically powered expert discovery and conversation system.

Stage: Closed beta; new users get 50 invites. Has been in the works for years and is relatively well baked.

Backing: Made up largely of ex-Googlers. The parent company is called The Mechanical Zoo and has raised $6 million from very hip VC firm August Capital and Ron Conway's Baseline Ventures.

For more info, see this review on VentureBeat.

Hunch

Premise: You may like the same advice for common questions that people with similar tastes like.

Logic: A series of decision topics have been populated with questions concerning factors to consider for each decision. Users go through and answer those questions and are then presented with a series of answers that other people who answered the questions the same way and who have similar tastes have said they are happy with. It's hard to explain but really easy to use. Users can add "factors to consider" questions to any question. There's a really interesting social networking component to it as well.

Home page: random questions; taste-profile-building question about you, users.

User experience: Using Hunch is an odd experience, but it's a whole lot of fun once you get it figured out a little bit. Much of the User Experience design is a model that you'll wish every website followed. It's quite game-like. That said, the site can be overwhelming and make your brain hurt. The service tells me that most people who said they think clowns are funny (as I did), and who don't do video editing on their computers, also liked the answer "no, you probably don't need to upgrade your Mac's RAM." I don't really know what to make of that. You'll probably want to go back, though, and you'll probably want to clap your hands and smile each time you do.

How It Differs From the Others: By far the most "involved" for users of these three services. The user experience is very structured but it's also a lot of fun. You could call this a profile-driven, crowd-built recommendation system.

Stage: Closed beta; new users get a very limited number of invites. One co-founder says it's still quite rough around the edges, but if that's the case we sure can't see it.

Backing: The company has raised $2 million in VC funding and has an executive team of successful startup founders who've sold other companies, most prominently Caterina Fake, one of the co-founders of Flickr, who is now Chief Product Officer at Hunch.

To read more about Hunch, see the company's official FAQ.

Swingly

Premise: Answers to any question you have can be found out around the web. Swingly finds those answers hidden in plain text articles, databases and other Q&A sites. Then it makes them structured for easy sorting in response to queries.

Logic: This un-launched company uses Seti@Home-style distributed computing to perform Natural Language Processing on pages all around the web, hunting for information that can be turned into Questions and Answers to serve up to Swingly users. The company believes that "next-gen search should [include] 'micro-retrieval,' rather than return pages, and return only the content (word/sentence/paragraph) you need."

A screen shot from earlier this week.

User experience: We've not been able to test Swingly yet, but it looks relatively straightforward so far. There will be any number of additional services built out as well, including a widget for bloggers to offer Q&A functionality on their sites. When you talk about billions of pieces of structured data that you can query with common questions, almost anything is possible. That said, Q&A is a field that several other companies have done a good job nailing already, from Yahoo Answers to ChaCha to Mahalo.

How It Differs From the Others: Swingly is the most mysterious of the three services and the most likely to become "a platform." It's also the most likely to suffer from the Powerset dilemma: hype, hyper-nerdy ambitions, big expectations, lackluster launch, $100m payday from Microsoft, getting turned into a term of derision among some in the industry and maybe buying a yacht.

Stage: Closed alpha right now. Starting to make the first public rumblings with screen shots, Twitter presence, initial PR outreach. "Alpha coming in late March and a public beta in mid-May. The alpha version will use an index of about 850 million question-answer pairs (more than all the Q&A sites put together) and will only be searchable. The beta release will consist of about 5 billion question-answer pairs and will include full questions and answers plus semantic search capabilities." - CEO Andy Hickl, last month

Backing: Dallas, Texas-based Swingly CEO and founder Andy Hickl is also CEO and President of the very related-looking Language Computer Corporation. CNN calls that company "closely held."

One thing's for sure - we're going to hear a lot more about Swingly. The company is working with Porter Novelli's Josh Dilworth, one of the smartest and most effective PR agents in the tech industry. Dilworth has a history of working with uber-nerd companies and getting them huge media coverage. His recent clients include database super-search engine Wolfram|Alpha (our review) and the most-discussed consumer semantic web company to date, Twine (our most recent coverage).

To follow the unfolding of Swingly, check out Hickl's personal blog.

Those are three companies we'll be watching closely as they break new ground in the combination of social and machine learning online. Which would you be most likely to go to first with a question? We'd love to hear from readers who have thought about this field, who are doing work in it as well, or who have initial impressions about these services that they would like to share. We expect to see a whole lot more like this in the near future.

Title photo Cyborg 2.0 by Y0si CC on Flickr

Aardvark will come out of its private beta during SXSW, but we have a few invites for you if you want to try it out now.

When you sign up with Aardvark, you simply add some basic information about your location, the topics you want to answer questions about, and your preferred IM client. Aardvark supports Google Talk, AIM, and Microsoft's Live Messenger. After this, Aardvark will live in your IM client and you simply ask it whatever question you might have in plain English.

Aardvark analyzes your questions, determines what they are about, and then passes them on to the people in your Aardvark network - or, if nobody in your direct network fits the bill, it will pass it on to the rest of the Aardvark community.

Q&A

In our tests, this worked surprisingly well. We did, for example, ask Aardvark about what parties to go to at SXSW and received an answer within a few minutes. When we asked for local clothing stores in Portland, OR, a good answer came in even faster. We even got some good book recommendations through Aardvark.

Aardvark features a number of simple commands that allow you to interact with the service and that are always explained in your conversations with Aardvark. When you get an answer, for example, you can simply type 'thanks' to send a thank-you note, or, whenever you feel like answering questions, just type in 'try' and Aardvark will look for a question that fits your expertise.

Better Than Twitter?

In our internal tests, we realized that a lot of the answers often rivaled those we received when asking our Twitter network. Thanks to the fact that Aardvark automatically routed our questions to people with the right expertise, all the answers we received so far were top-notch. In case you didn't like the answer (or if it was obscene), you can flag it and rate it on the service's website.

Overall, we think this is a great service and it is definitely one of the coolest products in this space that we have tested in the last couple of months.

Invites

Aardvark is scheduled to launch during SXSW, but we will send out an invite to the first 25 commenters on this post. Note: if you use your Facebook Connect or OpenID credentials to comment here, we won't see your email address!