The good news? This study predicts that restaurants will start using more social media in the next two years.

Currently, a total of 94% of social media-savvy individuals said they enjoyed going to restaurants compared to 88% of the general public. 51% of social media-savvy individuals and 48% of connected adults said restaurants were an essential part of their lifestyles.

In the meantime, here's a neat ReadWriteWeb guide for creating a great restaurant Facebook fan page.

Image via Maggie Hoffman.

Does your restaurant use social media to engage customers? Tell us about it in the comments.

UrbanSpoon will charge its customers a subscription fee of $99 per month and a $1 fee for every reservation that is made through its system (reservations through UrbanSpoon's widget will be free).

The application will store its data on UrbanSpoon's servers. Besides allowing restaurants to manage their reservations, the service will also include a customer relationship management database.

Manage Your Restaurant with the iPad

As Lowry told us, the iPad is an ideal device in the restaurant context, as it gives the host far more mobility than the regular large terminal that you can find in most restaurants today. Besides that, Lowry noted, the iPad is also very "cool and sexy," something that a lot of restaurateurs appreciate.

With this move, UrbanSpoon is clearly invading OpenTable's territory. According to Lowry, restaurateurs never really had an alternative to OpenTable until now. With over 8 million users, UrbanSpoon's iPhone app is already one of the most popular restaurant-related mobile apps and given that the company offers a cheaper subscription price and runs on relatively cheap hardware, the company, which has been working on this service ever since Apple announced the iPad, has a chance to make a dent in OpenTable's market.

Urbanspoon Has the User Base to Pull This Off

Urbanspoon's iPhone app has been incredibly successful and is currently getting over 1 million 'shakes' a day. The app and website started out with only a small set of features. Over the last few months, the company has continued to add features and, at this point, Urbanspoon can easily rival most of its larger competitors in this space.

With only four restaurants in one city, Urbanspoon is clearly still taking baby steps. As the OpenTable IPO has shown, however, this is a highly lucrative market. Urbanspoon already has a large user base, and whoever is using the service (and especially the mobile app) is obviously looking to go to a restaurant already. By adding a reservation system, Urbanspoon can offer its users a full range of services, from finding restaurants and checking menus and reviews, all the way to actually making the reservation.

For more info about Urbanspoon's new reservation system, check out Rebekah Denn's post at Eat All About It, which we found via the New York Times Bits blog Twitter feed.

When going out to eat, there's nothing worse than being told the wait time is 45 - 60 minutes and the restaurant is so over-crowded with customers that you can't even make your way to the bar. Unfortunately, the only choice customers have today is to crowd in and bear it since the paging systems used by restaurants have such a limited range. This is especially trying when you're at a restaurant that's in a mall plaza where other shops, bars, or coffeehouses are only steps away. But instead of being able to kill time in the bookstore, for example, customers have to wait, bored and crowded, in the restaurant's entry way.

ReadyPing solves this problem and does so without the need for restaurants to invest in additional hardware or software. Instead, the system allows for text messages to be sent to the waiting dinner guests. To use the system, a host or hostess enters in the party's name, number of guests, and a mobile number. When a table becomes available, the host clicks a button to send out a customized text message.

The cost of using the system is a flat $34.95 per month for unlimited messaging and there are no setup fees. At the moment, ReadyPing is U.S.-only, but there's no reason why they couldn't expand to other parts of the world at a later point.

Potential Issues

There is a potential drawback to using a system like this - and that's the restaurant customers themselves. Given free range, people will likely wander off much farther away from the restaurant than before and that could delay the time between the text's delivery and their return by several minutes, possibly even five or ten. This would dramatically slow down the seating process and would frustrate those on the list behind them.

Before a restaurant implemented such a system as this, it would be necessary to retrain hosting staff so they understood the potential issues. Perhaps instead of waiting until a table was actually ready before alerts were sent, ReadyPing users could anticipate ahead of time that a table was about to become ready. This would give customers the additional time needed to return to the restaurant from wherever they had ventured off to. Perhaps staff could even work out a system where awaiting customers were pinged as current customers were brought their checks. Further integration with restaurant POS systems to do so would be even better, but something like that may be beyond ReadyPing's capabilities.

Another potential drawback to ReadyPing is that some customers would be hesitant to give out their phone number, despite assurances that data is secured. For those customers, backup pagers may still need to be used or they may need to wait the old-fashioned way - listening for the hostess to call their name aloud.

Real-World Mobile Technology

In any event, the ReadyPing system is a great example of an application that solves a real-world problem which so many of us can relate to. Thanks to mobile technology, we expect to see more everyday, useful solutions like this in the near future.