The use of a mobile device's battery for frequent transmissions of position data in a location sharing application can be more expensive than the location retrieval itself. This is in part due to energy-agnostic application development and in part dependent on choice of protocols. This paper studies the lightweight Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) as an application layer protocol on top of the third generation cellular communication. The energy efficiency and amount of data generated by the public/subscribe MQTT protocol is experimentally compared against the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is currently used in typical location sharing applications.The evaluation results indicate that MQTT is a good candidate as a protocol for location sharing. At comparable bandwidth and energy expenses MQTT offers better quality of user experience, since the subscribers are notified at once when the location of some interesting client has changed. Our measurements show that MQTT is more energy-efficient than HTTP in the idle state and when the number of other users with whom the client shares location is low. When the number of users increases beyond 3, HTTP becomes the preferred option in terms of energy efficiency at the cost of a higher notification delay.