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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]