Social media communication sites like Twitter generate a massive amount of traffic. Its 2.3 million users generate over 3 million “tweets” per day (figures are likely higher, it’s growing as you read this). Depending on which side of the coin you’re on, that’s either a very cool stat about how much collective information Twitter’s users are generating, or a harbinger for the tangled mess of information that these will create (which might limit its usefulness). This deluge of data across the Internet has driven knowledge markets which aim to match subject experts (or just savvy Googlers) with people seeking information.

The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.

The cool element about Aardvark is that it’s a seamless merger of a knowledge market (a la Yahoo! Answers) and real-time conversation tools (Twitter). Want to know where you can get a good sandwich in your neighbourhood? A quick tweet polls the experts in your city, and you have your answer in real-time. Seems like the service could be structured for use within a company intranet too. For example, you could post a question about quarterly performance numbers or about warehouse inventory levels, and the question would get routed to the resident expert in each department, with the responses in real-time. From my experience, that would trump those long email chains that go back and forth trying to find the right person to answer a specific question.

Speed depends on the number of users on the network, which at around 1,200 the service is pretty small (Aardvark is still in beta)—but given that this is a version of an “applied” Twitter, and that beta invites are in short supply, it’s likely Aardvark will find quick cachet with the nation’s sandwich seekers. And other folks too, I guess.