I'm not very familiar with Foursquare's data. It seems comprehensive in San Francisco, but that's certainly not a great example. Is it pretty comprehensive, even in smaller communities?

I enjoy using Foursquare only for personal location tracking, I don't use any of the social features, and I've found the data to be quite good. I travel quite a bit (> 100,000 miles this year, 8 countries, more than 15 states, etc.) and the 4sq data has been pretty solid everywhere, surprisingly... I've been able to check-in pretty much everywhere I went except Palestine (understandably!)

One note: Almost all the places I checked into with 4sq were major cities (London, Paris, Gothenburg, Brussels, Rome, Chicago, LA, SF, Washington DC, etc etc.)

Major cities in Poland probably don't really count as major, but both Warsaw and Posen had good data. Same with Amsterdam and Haarlem in the Netherlands, and Fribourg in Switzerland (tiny city, but, on the other hand, a university town, canton capital and all-around awesome, so not exactly some forgotten village).

As a 4sq user in the UK, the data is obviously better in the bigger cities, but the vast majority of restaurants/shops/entertainment places in the smaller towns is present, maybe with just less tips/ratings.

Well the POI data is even worse than Apple's where I am in the UK. Of about 20 shops on the high street, 1 is in the correct location 4 are shown in totally the wrong location but in the town and the rest don't show up at all. On the other hand the map background data foursquare are using is from mapbox.com and its very good; much better than apple has and even better than google with much more local details, like footpaths, that google doesn't have.

In Portugal the Foursquare data is quite accurate, if not always comprehensive outside major urban areas.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the service, and while I have no clue about their financial status, I hope this is real and comes to fruition. It would be a shame to see 4sq acquired by some larger competitor instead of travelling their own path. A deal with Apple would be great for their sustainability, I'm sure.

What about Trip Advisor? They seem like some sort of pariah in this space. Hardly anyone talks about them, but despite their un-hipness, we've come to rely on them as our primary source of information when traveling. We regularly find more reviews on Trip Advisor than Yelp. I don't understand why Yelp gets all the attention?

Interesting - I think this is a nice move considering the rise of social media space. The data may not be perect now but over time I expect it to be good.

I wish they would ignore their damn differences and get Google's map data back :-/

I'm grateful for the competition, even if Google didn't really need it to drive the state of the art forward thus far.

Why ? Apple just needs to approach the same data providers Google uses and they will be about 90% of the way there.

And they do so without having to hand over user data to Google.

You use this argument again and again. Now you'll reply that in Australia all the POI are taken from Whereis, yellowpages and Tele Atlas. And once again people have to remind you that having the same data providers is not enough: you need to correlate data and fix inconsistencies, mostly manually.

Now go here https://maps.google.com/?ll=-27.605671,142.207031&spn=33... and read on the lower left: Map data ©2012 GBRMPA, Google, Whereis(R), Sensis Pty Ltd - Imagery ©2012 TerraMetrics, Map data ©2012 GBRMPA, Google, Whereis(R), Sensis Pty Ltd, Tele Atlas -

Now click on the yellow stickman and check the area that is covered by street view. So stop spreading misinformation.