Lufthansa has found an ingenious way to offer a useful, relevant social networking service. Their new MySkyStatus service allows you to enter your Twitter and/or Facebook account information, along with flight information for almost any airline flight in the world (not just Lufthansa flights), and the service will periodically update your social networks with status updates as to your whereabouts.

The updates contain a link back to the MySkyStatus site to a page providing a map of where you were at the time of the update. While not necessarily a particularly useful service, it definitely has that "gee whiz" factor going for it.

Unfortunately, along with heavily branding the MySkyStatus site, which I think is totally reasonable, Lufthansa includes the text "powered by Lufthansa" on every status update that the MySkyStatus service creates, along with the link back to MySkyStatus. In my mind that amounts to branding overkill, and will probably hamper the service's adoption rate.

So, kudos to Lufthansa for a cleverly providing a service that is relevant both to the realtime status update world of social networking along with travel. Too bad the execution wasn't a little bit more graceful.

Editor's note: Lufthansa wasn't the first company to think of this idea. We covered another company called ArrivedOK a few months ago that offers a similar service. But with ArrivedOK, you need to sign up through a separate site. What makes MySkyStatus nice is that you can use the service while purchasing your tickets.