Being an old fart (at least in the eyes of some of you) - I am not entirely sure what you mean in terms of being a twitter substitute. Could you explain? I think perhaps some of these messages - like I'm in Chicago and my flight is now 2 hours late - I don't have a clue what's going on - does anyone know - might be useful. OTOH - you can usually get that info in a more primitive way (walking up to the agent at the gate and asking).

Note that I always travel with a notebook - have been doing that for 20+ years now - even when I had get on line using acoustic phone couplers. The problems I run into with wifi anything in most places is that the connections aren't secure. I will never log onto a non-secure connection - wifi or otherwise. I do that to protect the personal data on my computer. I suspect there are corporations that have the same security protocols (because I frequently pick up their secure password protected connections when I'm in a hotel room - or even here at home). FWIW - even though I am close to Medicare - if I had a device that I'd be willing to use to log onto a non-secure network - if you gave me about 30 minutes - I could probably hack your computer. A skilled teenager could probably do it in 5 minutes . Robyn