Restaurants need to be better connected

Grant Achatz’s Next Restaurant does something with their Twitter @NextRestaurant that I think more restaurants should do, and probably in the future, will have to do:

@nextrestaurant: 6 top kitchen table available tonight at 9:45. $165pp plus pairings. Email samenight@nextrestaurant.com

It’s a simple way of letting customers know about supply and demand without having to manually “pull” reservations from sites like OpenTable. What other ways are there for a restaurant to share what’s going on? Fresh food? Specials? Deals?

There’s a fine line between spam and useful information, and thanks to Next’s current popularity, it is all useful. But what happens to restaurants like @LenasItalian? Just pointless spam. Is there a way to help these struggling/not-as-popular restaurants get up and running? Obviously Groupon isn’t helping.