OSLO alliance wants to share location across networks » VentureBeat

Description

During the days of dial-up, instant messaging came into its own but there was one major issue: If you weren’t on the same network as a friend, you couldn’t talk to them. For example, if you were on AOL and your friend was on MSN, you would have to email one another to talk. This problem spread into instant messaging clients as we moved to broadband, and though some of the big players now talk to one another, some still don’t. This type of incompatibility problem is the reason behind the formation of OSLO, or Open Sharing of Location-based Objects.

The alliance, as you might expect, aims to make the updating of location elements on one social network, compatible with other networks. So for example, if you tell Skout a location-based dating service and one of the founding members of OSLO) where you are, another social network, Moximity , will also be able to read that location data.

While I’m generally bullish on location and its future in the mobile social networking sphere, I fully recognize that the need to update your location on several different networks is a real problem. And it’s one that OSLO may be able to solve. But there’s a potentially big problem: Getting the big guys to go along.

Right now, OSLO has 10 founding members: Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN. The problem is that while combined they do have some 30 million users, chances are you’ve probably never heard of most of them. But when a company like Google launches its Latitude location service , it makes headlines worldwide and gets a million people to sign up in just a week. This is the kind of member OSLO needs to give its alliance clout.

And it may just ...

Original URL

http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/23/oslo-alliance-wants-to-share-location-across-networks/

http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/23/oslo-alliance-wants-to-share-location-across-networks/