You and I might call it spam, but small businesses who promote their products on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter call it smart advertising. No matter what you call it, don't expect those product plugs to go away any time soon. In an online survey, Internet2Go found that 45 percent of some 2,400 small business respondents with fewer than 100 employees said they use social networking tools to push their services or wares.

"For these guys, costs was a big factor," said Greg Sterling, an analyst for Internet2Go. "They either need to hire a dedicated person or need more resources and don't have it.

We're talking really small businesses here, as most of the respondents -- 8 out of 10 -- had four or fewer employees and annual marketing budgets less than $5,000. Nearly half of all respondents said they spend less than $1,000 on advertising and marketing, so it makes sense they would flock to Facebook and other essentially free venues.

"We are going to see more and more of this behavior from other small businesses because it's free and you don't have to have expertise to set up these pages," Sterling said.

Maybe you're not afraid to fly, but chances are, someone in family or circle of friends probably is. So that means every time you take to the skies, someone out there is worried about you, Put your loved ones at ease by allowing them to follow your flight on Facebook or Twitter.

The updates come courtesy of the new MySkyStatus service, which works with both of the aforementioned social networking sites. All you have to do is input your account information and list your flight details, and MySkyStatus will take care of the rest. While you stretch out in First Class for a mile high nap or pop a pair of earphones in your ears to drown out that whiny brat in Coach, MySkyStatus will keep busy periodically updating your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

DownloadSquad reports that there's quite a bit of branding associated with the service, which includes "powered by Lufthansa" with every status update, so you'll have to decide if that's enough to turn you off to the service or not.

Twitter already speaks both English and Japanese, which is twice as many languages as some of its American users, but it's only the beginning for the microblogging service. Expected to roll out soon, Twitter plans to add support for French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

"These languages are commonly referred to using the acronym FIGS and are often the starting point for services like Twitter when it's time for more language support,"  the microblogging service announced on its blog. "Later, we hope to offer Twitter in several other languages."

Twitter plans to add multi-language support by first tapping into its userbase. The microblogging service said it has begun offering a simple tool for people with experience in other languages to suggest translations for the Twitter website. Later on, Twitter plans to distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers, "making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Or to sum it all up in 140 characters: Twitter to add language support for French, Italian, German and Spanish. Wants volunteers to help translate website. See http://bit.ly/LIa4C