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A 2011 study by the National Restaurant Association confirms that consumers who use social media, including apps, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, UrbanSpoon and more, not only dine out more, but are more likely to become return customers. The study divided these techie-type consumers into two categories, based on data from the Association's 2010 National Household Survey: "connected adults," which refers to people who frequently use email and the Internet, and "social media-savvy adults," who use at least one of the following tools: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and other food review sites, or mobile-phone apps like Foursquare and UrbanSpoon.

A Tumblr-based blog that launched last week sarcastically takes restaurants to task for having notoriously bad websites.

The blog, titled Never said about restaurant websites features daily faux quotations that you can bet are never uttered in reference to sites belonging to dining establishments, which are often weighed down by unnecessary animations, overuse of Flash and menu PDFs.

As we become more accustomed to instant digital gratification, scenarios in which we have to physically wait for something begin to feel less and less tolerable. In some cases, like shopping in stores and going to the Post Office, there are ways around it. But if you want to go your favorite restaurant, and it happens to be packed, there's no way alternative: You need to wait in line.

Last week at BizTechDay in New York, attendees saw a demo of a product Textaurant that aims to eliminate that problem.

If you carry a Web-enabled phone and you like to eat, chances are it's happened to you. You're out. You're hungry. You want to check out a new restaurant nearby, or perhaps you're visiting another city. You pull out your phone to search for a restaurant. Even if you use a fancy, location-based app like Yelp or UrbanSpoon, you still want to see what's on the menu. So you click through to the restaurant's site, and... nothing. Turns out, the restaurant owner paid some kid who knew Flash to built a slick website for them five years ago that has no chance of loading on the BlackBerrys and iPhones of today.

Restaurant review site UrbanSpoon is slowly moving into OpenTable's territory. About half a year ago, the company launched a very limited test of a basic reservations tracking system for restaurants in the Seattle area. At that time, however, restaurant owners could only use UrbanSpoon to tell their customers whether they had last-minute openings. Now, however, UrbanSpoon is launching RezBook, an iPad app and online reservations platform that will allow restaurants to bypass OpenTable and manage their tables and reservation books.

After eating the best meal of your life, it's hard to forget the experience. It's not unusual for individuals to spend a decade in search of the perfect New York-style pizza in California or the best ramen in London. At this level of obsession, you simply can't be satiated by reading menus or scouring the blurry restaurant pictures and user-generated diatribes of regular review sites. Whether you've got a fixation on fresh lobster ragoût or a hankering for hickory smoked ham, Foodspotting lets hungry users peruse through what can only be described as food porn.

Urbanspoon is getting ready to take on OpenTable, the popular and publicly traded restaurant reservation service. Urbanspoon just started a pilot program with four restaurants in Seattle. Chances are that the company will then slowly expand this service to the rest of the 90+ markets it currently serves. Compared to OpenTable, Urbanspoon offers a fuller range of features for diners, though it is important to note that OpenTable currently offers more features for restaurant owners, even if they have to pay about $300 per month for a dedicated OpenTable terminal.

ReadyPing is a new mobile solution for restaurant owners which lets a host or hostess alert customers when their table is ready via a mobile notification. The system, a vast improvement over the restaurant pagers currently in use today, lets diners wander beyond the restaurant's immediate vicinity - something that would be especially handy for those one hour waits. The only question we have about ReadyPing is this: why didn't someone think of this sooner?