Gomobo uses Twitter for new 'food buddy' feature

Typically when we talk about Web 2.0 and food, we're either talking about the snack selection at a launch party or the virtual food fights that certain Facebook apps have made possible. Not this time. Gomobo, a New York-based start-up that allows you to order and pre-pay for food at participating restaurants on your cell phone or computer, plans to announce a new feature on Thursday that will allow you to connect your Twitter account to the service.

As a result, when you order pick-up food from Gomobo, it'll automatically send a message to your Twitter feed with the restaurant name, the pickup time, and an invitation to let fellow Twitterers connect with you and meet you at the location in question.

You can think about it one of two ways. One, if you're lonely and emo and want a food buddy, this is a way to broadcast it to your whole Twitter friends and encourage them to join you. (Gomobo founder and CEO Noah Glass assured me that you can turn it off in the event that you don't want people reading your Twitter feed to know that you're eating burgers for the third day in a row.)

Two, this could be a boon for chronic freeloaders. If you monitor your Twitter feed closely enough, you'll know exactly when and where to find a friend who'll have a side order of fries that you can pick at.

This development on Gomobo's part would probably be of more significance if it updated your Facebook status, since Twitter still has yet to break out of the early-adopter crowd that jumps on just about any social networking trend that has a remote possibility of becoming the next big thing. Nevertheless, while Twitter has been lacking both in widespread adoption and a concrete revenue model, the geeks have stuck with it thus far.

Gomobo's service recently exited its beta test of 100 New York eateries and is now available at participating establishments in a handful of other U.S. cities.