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Groovr is a mobile social network that is not as much focused on SMSing each other over SMSing your location, and others SMSing to “locate” your friends.

You can SMS your:

- Presence (a shout out)
- Location (check in)
- Locate your friends last check in
- Check in back home
- Comment on a place
- Create and check in to a place

Every user has a profile, check out the people page.

A user page consists of:

- Shout outs
- Check Ins
- Photos
- Friends
- Comments
- Send private message

Visit the Places page to see the recent activity around a/your location.

Each Place consists of:

- Photos
- Check Ins
- Comments
- Map

There is also a Pictures page.

I like the idea of grouping information into different sets, since you can create places and SMS about these places, there becomes a build up of information around a place that you can read about. Visit a place and see photo’s, and who’s been there, etc…And since you can upload photo’s, why not have a photo’s page, great idea.

Another section is called Mingle, this is basically forums.

Here is a list of the SMS commands.

But the general aim is to send a locate SMS to the system and it will tell you where your friends last Check in place is…but not sure if you can then SMS your friends.
I assume that when you add a friend, they will be notified of your text or photo…not sure if this will be SMS’d to their phone or they get an email notification to look at the web.

It seems you can only use Groovr by using SMS on your phone, it seems the only thing I can do from the web is add a friend, leave a comment, and send a private message (not sure if this will SMS the users phone).

Handy service for parents to keep tabs on their kids without having to phone them or SMS them, all they have to do is SMS the location they are at, and the parent can check their profile on the web, or the they can SMS a shout out (a general message) and the parents can again read this on the childs profile. As I already mentioned, I’m not sure if the parents receive an SMS or if they have to check the webpage.
The other way around is the parent can have a profile, and they can SMS where their contacts (children) are, and it gives the latest location of their contacts (not because their children are being tracked by a bug, but because their children manually SMS their latest location to let others know their movements).

Gee, the next level of automation would be to just scan a bar code and press send, but this means the whole world would have to be barcoded.
Funny about that, the public transport system in the city I live in uses a Smart card system, whenever I get on public transport I scan my card to get on and off the bus or train. The first time I logged into my web profile, it was a bit scary, big public transport brother knows my locations and time I was there.
They could consider adding an SMS notification each time you scan your card…my partner could know where I am without having to communicate with me. I suppose they could also have an RSS or email notification.

Actually I remember seeing a show on TV where people would take a photo of a landmark or place, and send it to a website, this website would then try to match that photo with a similar photo in their database, if they find a macthing photo the person is SMS’d an information guide about that landmark or place…pretty nifty, instead of barcoding the world to build up the database, they take photo’s of the whole world to build up a database.

See MyTago for finding info from barcodes, and STAMPS to SMS a note to a communal map.

[ADDED 12/01/07: A similar service is FriendsTribe]

MyTago is a great tool for users and publishers…see what it’s all about.

Take photos with your phone and email them to your MyTago account where all your images have their own public URL, it will even OCR text from an image.

Make a tag (a type of barcode), then you can put this barcode on your blog or on a poster in the real world. People can then click this tag to find out some information. In the real world if you see a poster with this tag (barcode) on it, you can take a photo of it then email it to your account or upload it to your PC.

Then when you get on your PC, you decode the tag, and it will give you information about that poster. Each tag also has a number string, so alternatively you can jot down the numbers and when you get to your PC, type in the numbers to decode (you can also email these numbers to your account, which is handy if your phone doesn’t have a camera).

NOTE: It will allow you to upload the photo to your favourite photo service, when you want to decode it, just go to MyTago and enter the URL of the photo from the photo service you have bookmarked it in.

Or if you sent the image to MyTago first, when you’re done you can then decide to upload the image straight to Flickr from within MyTago.

Your created tags

Each of your Tags (barcodes) has a public page and an RSS feed, and people can leave comments.
As I mentioned earlier you can add a Tag (barcode) widget to your blog, so it works in the online world as well as the offline world (I gather you can just click on the tag image in the online world).
Each tag has statistics and you can edit the icon and colour.

[ADDED: There is a mobile web version for your phone so you can find out more about that poster right there and then…but it would still be good if you could email the barcode number to MyTago and it would SMS you the information, similar to TextMarks.]

I’ve been blog tagged again, this time from a reader in the Indian blogosphere.

So here is 5 more things about me:

1. I’m addicted to reading (on the bus, on the train, at home, whilst walking…)
- currently I’m reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It’s where Quantum Physics meets mysticism…form is emptiness, emptiness is form, etc. Some conclusions are that the processes of nature lie outside of our 3 dimension reality or space-time (limited by our brain/eye), but generate events that can be located in space-time. Isn’t it ironic that our brains, using mathematics can describe non space-time reality, but our brains can’t help us experience it…and describing dimensions beyond space-time is limited with language/symbols, this needs to be experienced (meditation) and not explained. This is where quantum physics is looking to mysticsm.
Some amazing quantum experiments from this book are are the “double slit experiment“, “EPR paradox“, Bell’s Theorem, more here, and here.
2. I met my wife at a meditation class
3. I’m no longer a vegetarian, as I eat things that swim
4. I’m currently listening to Savath+Savalas (Apropa’t), Donna Regina (Slow Killer), Barbara Morgenstern (Nichts Muss)
5. I sit at the computer at lunch time instead of going to the gym

I pass the tag to these bloggers:

1. Tony Hirst (OUseful Info)
2. Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration)
3. Quick Online Tips
4. Ismael Ghalimi
5. Sid Yadav (rev2.org)