Gary Gale

When you release some code you've written under one of the many open source licenses that exist today, if you're lucky then you can expect to get asked for help using that code. Note that I say if you're lucky. Some people I know view giving help and support as, frankly, a pain; it gets in the way and stops them thinking about a new feature or the next big thing. I take the opposite view though, I see being asked for help as a compliment; it means someone has found the code I've written and actually thinks it might, maybe, be useful, so they're using it and need a bit of support in getting it to do what they want it to do.

So if getting asked questions about code I've written isn't a problem for me, then why am I writing this? It's not the being asked as much as it is what is being asked. Support questions such as ...

It's Friday, December 9th 2011 and I'm in the TSA security line at San Francisco International Airport. Shoes off. Belt off. Watch off. Laptop, iPad and Kindle out of my bag and into the trays.

TSA guard: "New rules. You don't need to take your Kindle out anymore. It's small enough for us to see it on the X-Ray machine in your bag"

Me: "That's good; one less thing to have to take out of my bag"

With the benefit of hindsight, it was probably inevitable but 5 years after the location based, check in social network we know as Gowalla launched and 3 months after they were acquired by Facebook, Gowalla is no more.

Despite launching in 2007, 2 years prior to Foursquare, Gowalla never seemed to be able to capture attention from either users or from the media in quite the same way as Foursquare. The similarities were many; both social networks used location as a key facet, allowed users to check in to locations they were at or near and to share those locations with other users and other social networks. But while Foursquare's game mechanics of badges and Mayors seemed to hit the right note with users, Gowalla's ill explained and ever morphing system of virtual items, spots and trips never seemed to make sense. No-one I've ever spoken to could explain exactly what the point of Gowalla was, whilst Foursquare's mechanics were simplistic and easy to grasp.

After loosing ground to Foursquare, Gowalla tried to act less as a sole source of checkins and more as a central aggregator of the disparate checkins from itself, Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, amongst others, but this move did little to slow Foursquare's ascendancy.

Updated 8/3/12 at 12.20 GMT

Judging by comments to this blog post, on Twitter and on Google Plus, the consensus seems to be that yes, Apple is using OSM data from 2010 outside of the US; inside of the US it's (probably) TIGER data and no, there doesn't seem to be attribution and Apple may well be getting a communiqué from OSM to that effect. Other sources of information on this include * The iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps thread on the OSM-Talk mailing list * Iván Sánchez Ortega has put up a nice map comparison between OSM and iPhoto's map tiles. * There's also another comparison between Apple's, OSM's and Google's map tiles. * Jonas. K has put up a blog post which comes right out and says that iPhoto is using OSM and other public domain mapping sources. * Finally, as a nice touch, this post seems to have made it into OSM Community Blogs.

In web and location circles, much has been made of Foursquare's recent "little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.

From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.