Group messaging was all the rage last year and one of the entrants into the space was a service built by Pownce’s Leah Culver, called Convore. The difference with Convore was that it focused on web-based community chat with a supporting iPhone app.

Today the team has announced that it will be shutting down Convore to focus on a new chat project called Grove.

Here’s what Culver had to say about Convore going away so that the team can focus on the new product:

We’re sad to announce that Convore will be shutting down on April 1st.

We are closing the site in order to focus our time and energy on working on Grove – hosted IRC for teams. We built Grove based on the lessons we learned with Convore and to better fit the needs of our business customers.

Group chatting never really took off for consumers even though GroupMe saw an exit when it was acquired by Skype last year and the Beluga team got scooped up to work on Facebook Messenger. It has been described as a “feature” rather than a “product” and the pivot for Culver and team to focus on enterprise solutions is a testament to that. It’s difficult to make money from a feature unless it completely caters to a very specific business need or purpose.

The Convore team has created an export tool to allow users to take their data with them and hopefully find a home for it elsewhere.

Grove is described as “Hosted IRC and so much more” by its team and is available as a 30-day trial for companies right now. The team says it will be using what it learned with building and supporting Convore and pouring that into its new project.

Grove has some stiff competition when it comes to enterprise chat, such as Yammer and 37Signals, but it appears that the service is geared more towards engineers and developers, as one of its main features is integrating with GitHub and other project management services.

➤ Grove

Plancast followed its own plan and released an iPhone app earlier today, right in time for SXSWi.

Designed by Leah Culver (@leahculver) the app follows the website pretty much to the letter, with no real new innovations. That’s not to say that that’s a bad thing – Plancast has gotten a lot of praise for the simplicity of its interface and ease of use. However, this was obviously a rushed/toned-down (but still welcome) app, that’s main purpose was to give Plancast a slicker iPhone interface than Safari provides.

We’ve have also been pretty on-board with what Plancast has been doing, and we understand that they just very recently closed a significant round of funding, so we don’t blame them for just getting this out for all to use and enjoy for the next five days in Austin (oh, and for all you other folks as well).

That said, as we’ve also said before, we feel that Plancast as it exists today is still only halfway there – plans are great, but for Plancast to really play in the location sphere (and maybe that’s not something they are interested in) we think that they need to either build their own check-in functionality and/or integrate with existing apps and/or check-in APIs so that not only can users make plans, but then they know who actually showed up and then can continue the conversation while they are there (although technically users could use the built-in Comments functionality to continue the conversation, but this functionality does not necessarily equate to being “checked-in” so we doubt many are using Comments for this).

For a first (and rushed) effort, however, this free app is a great step in the right direction for a service that is quickly becoming a preferred way to quickly set up events and meetups.