A new service called My Loki provides its users with the ability to share their location anytime they connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot. This service uses Skyhooks Wi-Fi positioning technology to locate users and can transmit their locations to various platforms such as facebook and various feed aggregators.

The best part of this new service is that users will have fully customizable privacy control settings so that they are able to set permissions to various degrees on who is able to see their location and to what detail. This concept is not new, AIM offered its users a location sharing feature last year but My Loki will make this feature accessible to many new platforms.

It seems the goal is to provide users with a quick way of updating their networks on their whereabouts in order to better facilitate potential get-togethers with friends in close proximity, although the users who will likely most benefit are frequent travelers. The potential for this service to really take off might also depend on the rate of adaption of Wi-Fi capabilities into mobile phones (the company plans to extend to windows mobile and symbian platforms) and the availability of Wi-Fi networks.

MyLoki provides a great example of placing more oil into the gears of social networking facilitation. Making it easier to track friend’s activities will surely increase networking efficiency but whether the potential benefits of location sharing outweigh the drawbacks – mainly the lack of privacy – remains to be seen.