Quite a lot of my friends have started using Foursquare and its integration with Facebook & Twitter. Fellow blogger Imran of ithinkdiff pushed his location via Foursquare to Facebook and I noticed two things:

  • The map was blank with a dot indicating his location.
  • The map had © Microsoft as a watermark.

The blank map is, well, not surprising since it is Bing Maps outside the US. The watermark however caught my attention, my first thought was that Foursquare might be using Bing Maps and hence the watermark, but the linked Foursquare venue page showed Google Maps. Interesting. My next guess was that Bing Maps is provided as part of the Microsoft’s Facebook SDK but I couldn’t find any information. Another possibility could be that Bing Maps is now part of Facebook’s API after their new found friendship, again I couldn’t find any information. Screen shots:

Facebook post:

Foursquare Facebook Microsoft Bing Maps

Foursquare’s venue page:

Foursquare venue Google Maps

PS: Sorry Imran :D

UPDATE: I finally got a reply from Dennis, co-founder Foursquare regarding this and this has nothing to do with Microsoft-Facebook deal. It is purely a technical decision. Google has a limit on the number of requests per day, Foursquare kept hitting that limit, the guys at Redmomd decided to lift the limit for Foursquare as a result Foursquare is using Bing Maps on Facebook.