Aardvark communicates with you through an instant messenger bot that is  currently compatible with Google Talk, AIM and MSN/Live! Chat. The bot approaches you in a very conversational style, using full sentences, thanking you and replying with ‘no problem’ when you decline to answer a question. It’s cute, in a Terminator-style way.

Aardvark let’s you customize your profile by adding tags, like technology or programming, and then sends you only questions that match those tags. This way, questions are routed to persons that are best suited to answer them.

Instead of posting your question on a page like Yahoo! Answers does, Aardvark checks to see if people in your network of friends have know-how in the subject you’re inquiring about. If it doesn’t find anyone, it goes on and searches for the same tag on the whole Aardvark database of users looking for people that are currently online. When it finds a person, it pops up a new IM windows with the respective question.

The user can choose to answer, pass or just ignore the question by typing ‘Busy’. If you’d like to make Aardvark leave you alone for a while, just type in ‘Away’.

If you’re not satisfied with the first answer,you can choose to resubmit the question, or if you don’t need answers anymore, cancel the search.

All the conversations are kept for later reference in the History tab on your site – and each question has its unique URL.

Aardvark, because it makes use of your network of friends and targets questions to knowledgeable people, gets absolutely fantastic answers, the best I’ve seen in a free service.

I’ve got 19 invites to give away, so if you want one, just leave a comment saying what’s your favorite Linux OS.

ZumoDrive is easy to set up, but unfortunately, you can only upload files from Windows or Mac; Linux users will still be able to access the web interface but without any upload capability. The small installation program that helps you create an account and select your desired capacity. The free plan includes 1GB of storage, but you can go up to 500GB with premium accounts.

After you sign up, you’ll have a ZumoDrive icon in the notification area which will allow you to change settings and view the status of uploads.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the upload speeds, topping at 200KB/s, which means you’ll have to wait a bit if you’re uploading a movie or pictures shot in RAW format. The same holds true if you want to upload your entire music library and use the iTunes integration.

An interesting feature specific to ZumoDrive, is that it caches frequently used files on your local disk – which means you can continue working even if an internet connection is not available. You can control how much space you want it to use by visiting the ZumoDrive Console.

ZumoDrive can also be used as a backup – if the hard drive in your laptop dies, you’ll still have the files if you uploaded them. It’s not very cost efficient though; Mozy’s Unlimited plan is 5$ whereas a 50GB plan for ZumoDrive is 11,99$.

Their iPhone application gives you about the same functionality of the web interface: view photos, listen to songs and read documents(Word, PowerPoint, Excel, .txt, .rtf).

I’ve found ZumoDrive useful in a couple of day-to-day situations, such as showing a colleague the revised presentation even though I forgot my flash drive and working in the lab using schematics saved on the iPhone/iPod touch application.

With Zumodrive, we help people store, access and share the bits of their life – their music, their memories and their ideas. People don’t want to think of where all this is stored and how to take it all with them on their various devices. They just want to know that it is all constantly protected, always accessible and easily shareable.  We have leveraged the cloud to make this more of a reality, and we would love to see cool netbooks where ZumoDrive could be added for a few more bucks with a click or two.  Would you be willing to pay a few more bucks to always have access to all your personal content? –Zumo Blog

I couldn’t get myself to pay for the premium service; the free option served my limited needs and I’d rather walk with my information stored on an IronKey, safely encrypted, not available to anyone who happened to pick up my iPod touch.

ZumoDrive has one advantage and disadvantage over Wixi: the iPhone application.

On one hand it doesn’t ask you for your password in order to access your files and on the other it provides great convenience over Wixi’s web app. I’m sure Wixi will get around to an iPhone application soon, if they want to stay competitive.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get a hold on the ZumoDrive team via email; I had prepared some interesting questions. I invite them to contact me via email. As always, I look forward to your comments and recommend you to try Zumo Drive and share with us your experiences.

Let’s take a logical approach. For starters, let’s talk about usefulness. It’s hard to say if Twitter is actually useful. In theory, everyone should connect with their close group of friends that share common interests, and maybe add a couple of celebrities. In this case, Twitter would let you stay on top of your real friends activity, easily communicate information and plans. How much does knowing what your friends are doing matter? I guess it depends from person to person. Does this have real value for you? I, personally, couldn’t care less that Joe is out having a picnic.

I would, however, care about an interesting article on my area of interest, a new web app or a linux hack. And to get that kind of information, I don’t necessarily need to add my real life friends – a total stranger could do that. So, you see, theory and real life don’t always match. Twitter is really useful when other people, who share your interests, post information that you want.

Maybe my approach was too cynical, but I do think this is why many people are using Twitter. We were all looking at Twitter the wrong way; It’s not about connecting with people you know, it’s about connecting with people who share your interests.

What would make Twitter even popular than it is now? An engine that could assess your interests and recommend you people based on that. Because people who use Twitter for a purpose, not just passing the time, would find it even more useful. It could become the ‘de facto’ way to share information – without censorship, instantly, to a targeted audience of people who care about what you’re saying.

I could count my real life friends on Twitter with the fingers on one hand. I follow 69 people; Journalists, bloggers, geeks and fellow writers from MakeUseOf. The stream of information is manageable and usually contains real value. It also allows me to get in touch with some of the most influential writers out there with just an ‘@’ sign.

I do admit to following Leo Laporte, the podcasting mogul and a couple of other tech celebrities like Kevin Rose. They rarely post actual useful stuff, but as a journalist (or ‘wanna-be’ as they would say), I fell that it’s important to know what the ‘thought leaders’ are saying.

I’m apparently breaking one of the Twitter Laws. I don’t automatically follow every one who follows me; Some people may be offended, some will most likely remove me after a week. But I’d rather get real information in a manageable size, than having a thousand followers saying absolutely nothing, just clogging up the screen, making the real important information hard to find.

We’re 500 words in, and we successfully established why and how Twitter is useful. There are still a few important questions to be answered, and we’ll discuss the importance of the design, word of mouth promotion and how Twitter exploits one of humans’ basic emotions, in a future article.

I want to hear from you the answer to this article’s main question: Is Twitter useful? What does it do for you?