The patent suggests that iPhone users will share bluetooth tokens to connect to nearby iPhones which will allow you to share photos, text, contact information — potentially limitless options. Even if you’re out of range of the initiating group member, you can daisy chain the information to a relatively infinite distance as long as you’re close enough to someone in the group. Apple uses a rock concert illustration in which the band initiates a group and can connect to the farthest listener as long as there are group members in between them.

We seem to have a recurring theme here with many of Apple’s inventions… education. The iPad could redefine how we do text books, and this iGroups patent could redefine how lectures are shared in the classroom. Think about it: with iGroups, a teacher could potentially simulcast his presentation, notes, even the week’s assignments to every student in the room. That would be pretty impressive.

We tend to think practically, but the social networking potential is still huge. There are many apps out there that connect people in certain locations — think Foursquare or Yelp — but those applications lack one crucial argument: not everyone has them. The user base is strictly limited to people who have installed the application and opened it at their current location. If Apple built a feature like this into an OS, we’d see the death of Foursquare and the beginning of a social networking monopoly, at least for iPhone OS devices. If Apple did with iGroups as they did with iTunes (platform independence) they could take over the world… no?

Not everyone wants to open an app every time they go to the bar, not everyone even wants to toy with an iPhone all night, but we could very easily see this become a trendy thing to do and destroy all chance of normalcy in social interactions. Want to talk to a girl tonight? Don’t man-up and walk over to her, casually say “hello” via a bluetooth message.

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Practical use? We’re having a hard time thinking of one… still thinking… umm… maybe you’re at Disney World and you want to grab your friends coordinates so you can calculate the quickest route to them. Yeah, that’s still pretty lame.

It’s something that Apple mentioned in passing about video calling. The patent clarifies what type of call would use this location technology:

“Note that the reference to ‘voice call’ here is not limited to a conventional, sound-only conversation. It may also include video of the two users, synchronized with their audio.”

It’s a very small reference, and we’re pretty sure that Apple is just covering their bases for the future. If they want to patent the technology, it only makes sense to include video calling as well… Marty McFly says we’ll be there by 2015. This location patent was actually filed in 2008, so this isn’t breaking news but it’s definitely something that we’d love to see added to the iPhone. Now we need to come up with a purpose for it.

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