There has been quite some buzz around OpenStreetMap lately, especially in the mobile sphere. Given that developers often have to pay a lot to use maps from commercial vendors like NavTeq or Tele Atlas, OpenStreetMap, which is offering its maps for free, is becoming an increasingly interesting alternative, especially as the quality of the maps continues to improve.

Right now, for example, you can buy Roadee, a basic OSM turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone for a mere $1.99. Waze, which just released its own mapping and turn-by-turn naviation application, sadly doesn't feed any of this data back into OSM, even though these two services could really benefit from each other's expertise.

Making Flickr Smarter

As for Flickr's integration of OSM, the company does a nice job at extracting interesting information from the OSM database when an image is tagged with an OSM ID. Thanks to this, Flickr can now understand if a building is a railway or subway station, for example, or if a certain place is a historic building, a farm, or a forest. Flickr only supports a small sub-set of all the tags that OSM currently supports, but as the Flickr team points out, OSM is still a moving target and it would be hard for Flickr to keep pace. After all, they still "have this little photo-sharing site to keep running."