"Group" Implementation

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"Where", Yelp, Yellowpage or any other LBSs of their kind that provides 
services to user (not those social gaming LBS), they only provide business 
services around user, but not socializing service. I want to have socializing 
service in our app. 

The first socializing service is to provide LBS user with member's location in 
the same group. A group could be any kind of group: family, friends, 
co-workers, basketball team, etc. Sometimes user wants to know where those 
members are. A simple example is that I want to know where my son is when he 
goes out with his friends, or where my parents are when they take an errand 
outside and don't know english, ... many occations when it's not convenient to 
call members to report their locations (if a family group has 6 people, they 
don't need to call each one of them to report location). Once members check in 
their current location in our app, users in same group can find it from our 
LBS. Of course, if members don't want to share their locations, they can simply 
turn sharing off. 

Our LBS doesn't need to create group, Socialrays has taken care of that. Three 
tables in our db take care of this: elgg_access_collections, 
elgg_access_collection_membership, and elgg_users_entity. 

What our LBS need to do is to isplay a list of groups that this user belongs 
to, and let user choose which group he wants to look, if his members just 
checked in their location, then give a flag and timestamp. Clicking a 
checked-in-member will display this member's check-in location. Remember 
Check-In happens at a business location (in restaurant case, user checks in 
when they select an individual restaurant), so this location address is human 
readable (not lat/long). And if we introduce Google Maps to our app, the 
location can be displayed in the map also. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jt.xion...@gmail.com on 9 Aug 2010 at 7:35

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Please refer to the shareable document "Group Design and Implementation"

Original comment by jt.xion...@gmail.com on 14 Aug 2010 at 5:15

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Just off the top of my head, i found the invitation to external people to 
private group will become almost impossible. The reason is as follows:

In socialrays.com, it only invites registered users to private group, it makes 
sense because after user accepts invite, the private group will become visible 
to him, the app just need to turn on that user ID's visibility to that group. 
But for an unregistered user, after he received a message inviting him to 
register to our app and to join a specific private group, he then go register 
to our app, but he can't see any private groups unless his friend sends invite 
again, in another word, it's still invite an internal user.

So the conclusion is: 

For public group invite, yes, you can send an invite to an external unregister 
user, because after he registers, he can see public group and directly join the 
group. 

But for private group invite, it only sends invitation to internal users.  

Original comment by jt.xion...@gmail.com on 14 Aug 2010 at 5:16