I have been waiting, patiently waiting for businesses to take advantage of Web 2.0 in a way that affects me. I wanted to see something that took advantage of this new technology and made my life better.

There have been a few examples floating around the Internet but today, I had one e-mailed to me from American Airlines. The application is called MileFinder and it is a mashup of companies that give you American Airlines AAdvantage miles. You simply enter the city you are interested in searching for and you are presented with icons for rental cars, restaurants, hotels and more.

I tried this out for the city of Miami as I am speaking there later this week at the NATD conference and I am also speaking in Ft. Lauderdale next week at an Altigen user conference.

I found MileFinder to be great. I can visually see hotels, restaurants and other businesses which will allow me to accumulate more miles. When I am interested in an icon I click on it and can see a balloon with more info. See the picture below for details.

It is good to see companies trying their hand at Web 2.0 applications and it is pretty fascinating to see that Google (News - Alert) Maps seems to be the typical way companies begin their Web 2.0 experiments.