As those of us in the US prepare for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I thought it was appropriate to reflect upon the new technologies we’re thankful for this year. In preparation for this post I polled a few of my colleagues to see what technologies they are most thankful for and why. Below are the answers. You’ll notice diverse responses that touch on the use of technology in our personal lives as well as within the enterprise. Interestingly, the overall theme remains the same – all of these technologies succeed in making our lives (professional and/or personal) more productive and fulfilling. After all, that is usually the main point of innovation, right? Enjoy our thoughts -

Twitter Guru Denis Hancock is thankful for: “the seamless integration between the camera on the iPhone, and SMS messaging. My wife is out and about with my daughter all day, and it’s SO easy for her to snap a picture of her and SMS it to me that I tend to get several each day. Getting those visual updates throughout the day makes my life a better place.”

Naumi Haque, our expert in sentiment analysis adds: “Personally, I am thankful for my Cisco IP phone and wireless Internet. It’s pretty basic, but it means I can seamlessly work from home when I want to/need to which has made me more efficient, saved me commuting every day, and let me spend more time with my family.”

Naumi also considered enterprise level innovations and added that “the combination of sentiment analysis and CRM will be huge. It will allow companies to merge 2.0 customer experience activities (like Twitter, participating in blogs and forums, Facebook fan pages, etc.) with their contact center operations, get a single view of the customer, and develop an official support structure around Web 2.0 channels so they can measure ROI of engagement activities. This technology will also lower market research costs as companies gather insights from customers simply by “mining opinions” online.”

Author and prolific blogger Steve Guengerich is thankful for the iPhone 3Gs. It is “much faster, contains more storage for media, files, and apps., and allows me a big step closer to a future without a desk or office, where I can just carry my compute power with me in my pocket. It is indispensable.”

Jeff DeChambeau, technology whiz and online gaming authority “can’t say enough good things about Dropbox – you install the service on your mac, pc, or iphone, and it adds a folder to my documents, then anything you save there is synced across all devices linked to your account. You can also share specific subfolders with friends and peers, and any change (all tracked and version controlled) they make to shared files is updated for everyone immediately, effectively turning every file into a wiki.” See Jeff’s post last year for more details and a cool video of the service.

Jeff is also a big fan of “Yelp!, especially their mobile app. It’s great and often settles many “well where should we eat?” debates quickly with reliable suggestions, especially when visiting unfamiliar parts of the city. Simple but tremendously helpful.”

And from our Product Development and Web 2.0 expert Steve Elmore, he is most excited about Google Wave. It “ has the potential to be a game changer, combining email, instant messaging, wikis, file sharing, and social networking. But more importantly, this is not proprietary Google IP or infrastructure, but rather an open protocol available to anyone who wants to build a Wave server – this alone will promote rapid development.”

From a technology perspective I am most thankful for the adoption of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I can effectively connect with colleagues, friends, family and follow interesting people and brands, keeping up to date with numerous stories all at the same time. In less than a couple minutes I can see that the Call for Papers date at a conference was moved, a new product was launched at a company I follow, my sister is back from vacation, CNN is interviewing Sarah Palin at 3 o’clock, so-and-so had her baby, my co-worker needs help with a project, my son is acting up at daycare and my Manager will be traveling until tomorrow. I know it can seem like information overload, but I get more value out of the little interactions both professionally and personally than was ever possible even 1 year ago. I believe it makes me a more productive professional, a more informed individual and a better friend. So as we get ready to carve our turkey tomorrow, what technology innovations are you most thankful for?