Microblogging for German Tourist Information: touristinfo.status.net

The German website urlaub99euro.de - 'Vacation in Germany' - promotes tourist information, hotel and vacation homes via touristinfo.status.net

[Deutsche Version]

Twitter and Facebook dominate the modern Internet scene. Long ago, users recognized the value of social networks and increasingly access their wealth of information via Web 2.0 – particularly in web-related areas like tourism. The choice of vacation destination in 2010 depends less on the wholehearted promises of the hosts on their homepages ("with us, you can take a break from the everyday"), but more so now on the lively, interactive flow of communication that the Communities and Blogs make possible. For example, Blogs, tourism offices and current tourism summer specials for vacation guests to particular destinations. Or vacationers inform their online friends of their latest experiences.

Now after the global success of Twitter, there is an open source version of the known Microblogs: with status.net (an excellent start-up company from Montreal – StatusNet, Inc.), an enterprise or a website portal can pursue their own "Twitter". This doesn´t even require a server installation, but is available as a "Cloud" version. As the first portal worldwide for "Vacation in Germany", urlaub99euro.de by Dr. Eckard Ritter is making use of the service at touristinfo.status.net where hoteliers and vacation providers of all types publish their vacation offers and tourism information. So simple and fast just like with Twitter - only with less clutter and garbage!

With this, Dr. Ritter´s tourism advertising agency has clearly made the right choice: just this week, the clever Canadians report a commercial success that makes an even quicker growth possible –"The company ... has taken on additional investment ... The round brings StatusNet's total investment to date to $2.3 million." [StatusNet]

Microblogging a la Twitter is ideal for the tourism industry: while the high season is in full swing, the speedy communication of Last Minute offers, break locations and vacation tips is vital. And this is the primary attraction of the modern Microblog, yes... that stream of articles on today´s Internet that Web 2.0 can multiply in an easy manner - via Feeds and RSS. Therefore, status.net can be used to communicate current news on the homepage of a tourism site - or for content syndication with other sites - and among other things ... Twitter! - to make the information readily available and with some luck, have it go viral. Just as importantly, this possibility is also suited to Facebook Pages - like facebook.com/urlaub.in.deutschland - because it is especially easy to display a feed here and with this, make it available to the 500 million Facebook users.

The image shows Google's SERP Nr. 1 on "Urlaub" (vacation) on status.net - obviously touristinfo.status.net is in fact the Nr. 1 German language vacation site on status.net