eLifespaces

United States Patent & Trademark Office [Application #20100070758] reveals an iPhone App (“iGroups”) in which a number of these type devices co-located at a geographic location can broadcast and receive “tokens” (tokens - legalese or technospeak for social networking stuff).

Apple’s iGroup will be a service that will work on your iPhone(R) (or iPad) and likely work with a number of other Apple proprietary apps (e.g., calendars, address books, email, and instant messaging). iGroups would automatically detect that a group of users is in or around a specific location. The concept is to allow groups of friends attending an event (family get together, concert, meeting, tradeshow and more to stay in communication with each other as a group to share information to live events as they unfold.

Further descriptions such as, “In some implementations, the tokens can be stored with corresponding timestamps to assist a trusted service in matching the tokens with tokens provided by other devices” gave it a ‘Big Brother’ feel, particularly in light of recent Internet privacy concerns.