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Take the professional recommendation tools from LinkedIn and the Q&A capabilities of Yahoo Answers, and you'll get something like GigPark (or, LinkedIn Answers, but you see my point). This new site has just emerged from private beta, and it's a tool for individuals to look to their friends to get personal recommendations on professional services, like photographers, personal trainers, caterers, etc. One helpful aspect of GigPark is the ability to ask for a recommendation from your friends, and wait for it to be answered by another member.
What makes this site so different is its focus on friends. You can find existing friends through your Gmail account, and thankfully you can also link GigPark to your Facebook account so that you can immediately begin to leverage your friends' knowledge base for personal recommendations. I do, however, feel that GigPark is a little bit too closed off, in the sense that you can't find other knowledgeable users within the GigPark community and request them for recommendations if need be.
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While you can receive recommendations from friends of friends, this is still an overall limiting factor. I still like the concept of the site. It's similar to what we're seeing from sites like Delver, when allow you to tap directly into your larger social network for any search query.