Lufthansa's 'MySkyStatus' Tweets and Facebooks Your Flight Status For You

October 12, 2009 at 5:28 PM | by Omri | Comment (1)

Lufthansa is announcing the launch of MySkyStatus, a new web service that lets you send live information about your flight status to your Facebook and Twitter streams. The setup is entirely straightforward - give them your account credentials, type in your flight information, and you're good to go. Regardless of what airline you're flying, the service will send updates like "Jaunted is now flying over Paris, France" to your accounts.

This seems like a neat way to keep friends and family abreast about where you are, plus status updates are supposed to be about your status. If you're over Paris that's what you'd be tweeting if you had cell phone access. So you might as well set up a service to do it for you. The messages even come with a link to a Google Maps mashup that shows your plane's location.

We can also imagine some practical uses for MySkyStatus. It would be that much easier for your ride to know when to leave for the airport, for instance, if flight delays were listed prominently at the top of your Facebook or Twitter page.

All the practical functionality is already available through the web's billion flight stat trackers, and usually we're pretty critical of elaborate yet redundant travel-related social apps. MySkyStatus is pretty minimalist, though, and there's a difference between sending someone an updated itinerary through your Twitter stream and making them hunt it down online. Plus the whole idea of a status update about your flight location really is kind of cute.

Lufthansa's status updates are branded so the airline gets a little promotional bump with each ping, allowing them to offer the whole service for free.

Related Stories:
· MySkyStatus [Official Site]
· Lufthansa Coverage [Jaunted]
· Flight Tracking Coverage [Jaunted]

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