Almost out of nowhere however, Apple appears to be making steps in that direction. Patently Apple is reporting that the firm has filed a patent covering an "iPhone social app".
Called iGroups, the app is being designed to allow users attending an event to stay in touch and post their thoughts during its duration.
Keeping in contact
"The idea is to allow groups of friends or colleagues attending such events as a concert, a tradeshow, business meeting, wedding or rally to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information or reactions to live events as they're occurring," the site reports.
"This marks Apple's fourth social networking application made public since the start of 2010 which clearly indicates that Apple now has this hot new sector in its crosshairs."
Business base
Indeed, rather than offering up a check-in system like Foursquare, MyTown, Gowalla and scores of others, iGroups seems like it may have a use for enterprise.
"A typical individual may have many brief contacts with individuals for which they would like to have further correspondence post event," Patently Apple continues.
"With conventional social network websites, the individual would have to collect personal information from the contacts, manually create a social network on the social network website and invite the contacts to join."
iGroups could well negate the need to set up such networks, offering more competition in Facebook's direction than it does the league of location-based social apps.
[source: Patently Apple]
