Facebook Fueling Car Sharing

The car sharing (or carpooling) idea is not new. About 100 million people drive back and forth to work every day on the United States alone. The energy that is used to transport one person could easily be used to transport four or more, creating huge environmental and economical gains.

In the past most car sharing schemes failed to catch, mostly because it was difficult to match people efficiently.

Things are starting to change according to a BusinessWeek article. An entrepreneur based in Massachusetts developed an online service that leverages the immensely popular Facebook platform to create a very efficient car sharing system:

How does Chase plan to get better mileage out of GoLoco? Well, the service is currently available exclusively through an application within Facebook, allowing GoLoco to take advantage of the social network giant’s recent expansion to the world beyond college. Matching up with the popular social networking site makes sense. Facebook’s primary audience, college students, provides an ideal demographic for ride-sharing—they’re young, they care about the cost and environmental impact of transport, and they’re already comfortable with the nuances of social networking. For this demographic, it’s the obvious alternative to the paper-based college ride board of yore.”

For more information you can check the GoLoco.org website.