The addition of Denis Crowley’s Foursquare is probably the biggest news in terms of web services. After Facebook, Foursquare is the largest geo-location social network, and is the darling of the media. Foursquare under Ovi Maps is both tightly integrated, but also reliant on some user intervention.
The first sign of integration shows up when you check in, Ovi Maps will look for the nearest location that it knows about (from both your places bookmarks, but also those made by public by others) and ask you to match them up. If there’s nothing there, you can add a new place to the Foursquare database. I’m sure that Nokia are grabbing the confirmation of Foursquare places at the same time.
The second is that after checking in, all the stuff that differentiates Foursquare, including your running daily “score” and mayorships, is displayed in a ribbon of icons. This isn’t just checking in, it’s checking in and providing an additional service.
It’s just a shame it took so long after the standalone Foursquare app was released around Nokia World last year. Still, it’s in place for SXSW, and now we can wait and see if Gowalla is going to join in the Ovi Maps ecosystem in the near future.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2011.
