By Everett Potter

Heather Whaling, a marketer from Florida, was recently planning a business trip to Long Beach, CA, and wondered if she should fly into Long Beach or LAX. She could have looked at blogs, checked out airport websites, or even called a travel agent. Instead, she turned to a different network—her friends on Twitter. “Everyone said to stay away from LAX,” she says. Following the advice of her fellow tweeters, she flew into Long Beach.

Twitter, the 140-characters-at-a-time Web phenomenon of the moment, turns out to be a powerful tool for travelers. It can take you deep into the collective mind of the Internet to find the latest—and often the hippest—information about hotels, restaurants, and airfare deals. And lots of travelers are discovering the site’s potential.

A bit of Twitter 101 (skip ahead if you’re already tweet-friendly): it’s a free service that lets you send and receive brief messages, called tweets, which are restricted to no more than 140 characters of text—meaning Twitter is a hybrid of instant messaging and blogging. People who follow you get your tweets, and you can choose which other Twitterers you want to follow. Tweets can be sent and received on twitter.com, traditional e-mail accounts, mobile phones, RSS, and Facebook.