A social networking industry group calling for the cross-compatibility of location information across networks has emerged, according to VentureBeat. Dubbed OSLO, or Open Sharing of Location-based Objects, the alliance currently has 10 founding members including Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN.
In a nutshell if works like this: for example, if you update your location on Moximity, it would also update on Rummble. If OSLO could gain traction it would be a boon to the location-based social networking industry. One of the big problems with the lack of social network compatibility is that smaller players like Moximity, which provides an excellent service, won’t gain the traction of a Facebook because its just not convenient to post the same information on multiple networks manually.
A service like this could indirectly improve the user base of smaller social networks by providing nothing more than convenience. Furthermore, location data cross-compatibility could bring out the full potential of the social networking industry as a whole by connecting multiple networks, enabling users to potentially make new connections. The sheer amount of segregated social networks at work currently tend to work against the industry as a whole because businesses become nothing more than redundancies. Look at Facebook Connect and the success it has had connected blog communities with the 175 million strong Facebook community. It’s been huge and there are roughly 1 million Facebook Connect users currently. OSLO could create the same effect from a location-based services perspective.
But as VentureBeat points out, one of the major challenges will be getting players like Google on board. Within a week of launching its Latitude friend finder recently, the Google service already had 1 million users. And it just isn’t all that great. Some of the OSLO members provide functionality well beyond Latitude, but have much less than 1 million active users after being around for several years. The pull a Google could provide is exactly what OSLO needs.
Apparently the OSLO alliance was at the Mobile World Congress last week and spoke with Google, Yahoo and Vodafone, all of which expressed “positive interest”. That’s a good start, but OSLO definitely needs a major company on board to really get off the ground.
OSLO doesn’t have an official website at the moment, but it has set up a Google Group that requires membership.
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