Over the past few weeks I have been on a conference binge. I attended the Community Next and Graphing Social Patterns conferences out in the San Jose area, Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in New York, Snap Summit in San Francisco and yesterday’s New New Internet conference in Reston, Virginia. It has been an exhausting few weeks but one thing I’ve gotten used to is sleeping on people’s couches. Rather than blowing all my cash on hotels, I’ve simply asked people to crash on their couch for a night or two. If you are looking to travel on a budget, sleeping on couches may just be the best option.

In the past couple days, IdeaCloud (an application development shop) launched the CouchSurf application. CouchSurf is the Facebook version of CouchSurfing.com. If you want a quick way to meet interesting people while traveling, couch surfing is definitely one way to go. While I’m not quite sure that I would personally want to sleep on someone’s couch that I don’t know, it is always a free alternative to hostels and you also have the comfort of a fully furnished apartment or house.

There are some die hard couch surfers out there. While I haven’t had the fortune to meet any of these individuals I’m sure that they are a great group of people. The CouchSurf application has failed to gain any significant traction so far but given the large market of couch surfers, there is some potential for this to grow. Conversely, the Couch Surfing Facebook group doesn’t have many users and doesn’t appear to be a highly active group. If you want to try out couch surfing on Facebook, grab the CouchSurf application.