Facebook overtook Google Maps in the final months of 2012 to become the most downloaded app of the year among U.S. users on iOS and Android platforms, according to comScore data released today.
We're kicking off our upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here. 
Apple is in talks with Foursquare about using its local data to improve its maps application, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Uber “wasn’t ready” for a public emergency like Hurricane Sandy, Ryan Graves, the company’s head of global operations, admitted in a public interview in San Francisco today, but otherwise did little to backpedal from his company’s brash approach to pricing and regulation.
Findery, notes-on-maps application led by Catarina Fake launched its public beta on Friday. Findery allows users to create notes and place them geographically. For instance, one user wrote about an artisan cheesemaker and placed the note atop the spot on the map. Users can share their notes publicly, with their friends, or keep them private. They can also share the notes through Facebook and Twitter.
Local business review site Yelp has marked a pin in Apple’s answer to Google Maps. Now that Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 6, is ready for download, iPad and iPhone users will be able to check out Yelp reviews on Apple maps in 17 of the countries that use Yelp.
Image courtesy of Google
Communication between governments and citizens is being channeled with the release of YouTown, a mobile app that allows agencies to publish local news, events, maps, calendars, and services straight to the smartphones of residents.
Google has released an update to the mobile web version of their Maps app that puts it on par with the capabilities of the desktop web version. You access the mobile web version of Google Maps by entering maps.google.com in a mobile browser.
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Pete Warden is the founder of OpenHeatMap and a former Apple software engineer. Pete loves gathering, analyzing and visualizing all the lovely big data sets that are emerging. You can follow him on Twitter or via his blog. Social Times interviewed Pete in June about how he almost got sued by Facebook.
I’m Pete Warden and I’m obsessed with visualizing the world’s relationships. I’ve previously built graphs of Twitter conversation networks and split up the US by Facebook friendships, but it drove me crazy having to build a custom piece of software for every new map. I couldn’t find a tool out there that let me build the visualizations I wanted, so I created OpenHeatMap. It’s an open-source project to allow anyone with a spreadsheet to create an interactive, shareable online map. Read more
