[Foundation-l] Foursquare ditches Google Maps for OpenStreetMap

[Kai Krueger]

>2012/3/1 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>> Other companies doing similarly:
>>
>> http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma
>> http://www.fubra.com/blog/2011/11/24/google-maps-free-alternatives/

>... And, in case anybody missed this piece of news, so will
>Wikimedia's official mobile app in version 1.1, now in beta.

A further bit of information in case people aren't aware of it:

A number of Wikipedias (noticeably ru-wiki, de-wiki, es-wiki, fr-wiki,
it-wiki, pl-wiki, fa-wiki, ca-wiki, da-wiki el-wiki, lv-wiki, nl-wiki,
no-wiki and possibly some others I don't know of) have already included
OpenStreetMap maps in geo-referenced articles through the osm-gadget (
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:OpenStreetMap/en ). Some of them
since over a year. The maps are rendered for now on, and served by a
server provided by the toolserver project.

So yes, the model imho works well and can hopefully eventually be
included in en-wiki as well.

This server also renders maps in all of the 200+ Wikipedia languages,
provided the data is available in OSM (
http://toolserver.org/~osm/locale/ ), although due to performance
reasons they are afaik not currently in production other than on the
ru-wiki. In order to make different language maps feasible for
production in all Wikipedias, Wikimedia-de is funding a project to try
and find a scalable solution. (
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Kolossos/CPB )

Kai