Many blog posts reported in the last few weeks about Google’s changes to their Google Maps API and the new usage limits. If a website that implemented the Google Maps API receives too much traffic or hits e.g. more than 25,000 per day, charges will apply [1]. This news caused some websites to start looking for alternatives and some of them switched to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. You can read more about how and why you should also switch to OSM on the great switch2osm.org webpage.

As maybe some of you already know two prominent examples that switched to OSM within the past two weeks are Foursquare and Apple. You can read more about Foursquare’s switch here and about Apple here. Richard Fairhurst wrote a few days ago (on March 8th [2]) that the OSM Project was experiencing a nice boost in several categories such as:

• more map tiles than usual that have been requested
• new members on the OSM IRCs asking on how to make changes to the OSM data