Foursquare is saying bye bye to Google Maps.Instead of Google Maps it’s moving to OpenStreetMap which is a crowd-sourced global atlas and also it’s like Wikipedia for geography.
Foursquare announced “Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love”.
“As a startup, we also often think about how we can make life easier for other startups”, Foursquare says.
Foursquare says it chose MapBox for three reasons:
1.It’s based on OpenStreetMap data, so it’ll continually get better.
2.They give us a ton of design flexibility. We can alter things like colors and fonts, so we can match our own aesthetic. And we’ll keep tweaking the look to make it better.
3.It also allows us to use the open source Leaflet javascript library to power the maps. We look forward to contributing to that project and being part of that community.
“New Google Maps API pricing was the reason we initially started looking into other solutions” Foursquare says.
