What happens when you add a chat room to Foursquare or Facebook Places? You get ChatSquare, of course. ChatSquare is a mobile app developed by ISraeli entrepreneur Nir Ofir. It works in the browser on iPhones and Android phones. You connect to your Foursquare or Facebook accounts and the app lets you check into places in their geo-directories and chat with anyone else there.
There are three kinds of chat rooms in ChatSquare: a chat room in a specific place, a local lobby and a global lobby. The local lobby lets you chat with anyone within a few miles. But the place chat is the most interesting. You could use it as a back channel at a conference, or to flirt with someone at a bar. Or, you know, if you are in the same place, you could just go up and talk to them.
Creating virtual chat rooms in real places just means that more people will have their heads down in their smartphones, but in large group situations I can see this taking off. It reminds me a little bit of GroupMe, a private group SMS service which launched at Disrupt’s NYC Hackathon. GroupMe is not tied to places specifically, but that seems to be one of the popular use cases.
MobileCrunch got a sneak peak at ChatSquare in September. The video is below.