Leading mobile social software developers, including Irish start-up Locle, have announced an agreement to enable their 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks, which until now has not been possible across different social networks.

The alliance, named OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) was formed in late 2008, to ensure the incompatibility problems that have plagued instant messenger platforms (e.g. MSN users not being able to message AOL users) are not repeated with location based social software. In addition to Locle, founding members include many of the pioneers of mobile social networking and location-based social software like  aka-aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Mobiluck, Moximity, Nulaz, Palringo, Rummble, Service2Media, Skout, Tooio and WAYN.

Olivier Chouraki, CEO of Mobiluck, Paris said "Sharing location across multiple location-enabled services is enormously beneficial for users who will no longer need to update their location in several services at once. And mobile advertisers will benefit from our combined volumes and our ability to better target their campaigns based on location, improving click through rate, ROI and user satisfaction."

The founding members anticipate that other larger web companies will follow Google's initiative and will launch similar friend finder products, using different standards.

Ronan Higgins, (pictured above with Co-Founder Peter Oonk) CEO of Locle who won a quarter share in Eircom's €100,000 Web Innovation fund last year and were shortlisted in the IIA's NetVisionary awards 2008,  said OSLO is an attempt to lead interoperability before a raft of competing standards appear. This was echoed by Simon Tennant, CEO of Buddycloud who said "Our aim is to prevent yet another fragmentation of technologies building on existing standards and delivering a tangible, usable model today, for OSLO members to implement."

OSLO is working to finalise the technical details of how users can share their location information between friends on member networks.

However, Andrew Scott, CEO of Rummble emphasises that end user privacy and security is not only a priority, but a pre-requisite. He said "OSLO is focused on improving the social networking experience for all via an open standard not controlled by one company. Both Google Latitude and Yahoo's FireEagle do provide a good example of permission based sharing allowing levels of location accuracy - e.g country, city or exact location. These tiers are something OSLO looks to standardise."

OSLO currently mandates that member companies should be able to query the location of users, as long as that user has opted-in to share their location with other OSLO services. At a technical level, the core objectives of OSLO are to enable the ability to:

• Query an OSLO partner's location server for the positions of friends within x miles (kilometres) of a specified lat,lon

• Query an OSLO partner's location server for public-shared profile information (photo, age, gender, hometown, etc.) of a specific user

• Pass a message into an OSLO partner's server to a specific user and enable return messages

• OSLO alliance member companies adhere to a strict set of rules to ensure end-user privacy and security is not compromised.

Scott continued "There is a lot of activity in this space and "location was a hot topic at this years Mobile World Congress. The mobile industry can learn a lot from the more open approach often taken by traditional internet services and initiatives like the GSMA "One-API" thankfully show signs of a positive change."

He concluded "We all hope OSLO can help accelerate take-up of social software on mobile and provide real benefits to the consumer; who are so often long suffering of the fragmentation of technical standards our companies battle on a daily basis."

More Locle News on IrishDev.com