First we had
twitter, born out of the team behind
odeo, designed to answer the age-old question - What are you doing?
Now we have its smarter, more flexible, more organised little brother,
Groovr [via
Mashable] (among the large and growing family).
Groovr is different in that its location aware - users check in when they arrive somewhere, and check out when they leave. While they're checked in, they can post up messages/comments about that place, and they'll all be grouped with others who have visted that place and commented. It can also tell you where your friends are, and you can do all this via simple mobile email commands.
The interface is quite nice too, simple and very user friendly. As its still small though, it'd be interesting to see how it copes with more places when it grows. There are some duplicate places in it already too as users get lazy or don't use the place's full name. As there's no interaction when you check in, the website simply takes what the user submits, without offering similarly-named suggestions for the user before creating a new place. GPS location would help, but then there'd still be issues with places in the same building, above and below each other. A web interface with GPS location would be the best solution, but until web interfaces are fully integrated into the mobile and user-friendly, they're a pain to use compared to writing a message.
Unfortunately, twitter, groovr and most others are US-based, so they either offer a US mobile number for you to SMS to, or an email address which while it costs the same to email to anywhere in the world, us Australians still don't have reasonably priced emailing services available to us on our mobiles. So its still basically off-limits to us
.
Demand for this type of service will grow, but right now it is still too clunky in my opinion. Checking in should be a very easy process, with your location options whittled down to a couple of options by GPS positioning, and a friends list should be available all the time, along with information about their location like the address, map and directions. Combined with some of the features of
Dodgeball, like friends of friends and crushes, that will be the ultimate mobile social networking service. All this of course, will need to be secured quite tightly; otherwise it makes a stalker's life very, very easy.