I’m fairly high-tech, but I think one gets to a point of new-technology saturation, which is why I haven’t even looked into Twitter. But I saw this in a post by Duncan Riley of Techcrunch.com:

Twitter is like being married, you love it dearly but some times you want to strangle it. Twitter has transformed my networking in the last 12 months. It served as a conduit to building new relationships in a way that Facebook, FriendFeed and others never will. I can walk into a tech meeting/conference/meetup anywhere in Australia now and although I may have never met anyone in the room in person, I’ll know at least one person (usually more) from Twitter; you can’t buy that level of contact and its given me friendships and acquittances that could never have come around by any other means.

That sounds fairly valuable for the business traveler, doesn’t it?

Twitter started as a cellphone-based version of instant messaging. Via text message (SMS), you ping other people (actually they call it “tweeting”) with one simple (and automated) question: What are you doing? (Or, of course, they tweet you.)

The usefulness, I gather, is that it combines the immediate-gratification conversation of IM with the development of a network of fellow users, a la social networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Your friends have friends, etc., and you can explore these six-degrees-of relationships at Twitter. And hence, I gather, find people at your destination who probably know people who are in the same business you are.

If you spend more time on your smartphone than you do on your desktop, this could be a worthwhile application to look into, I’m guessing.

–Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer