Every week it seems another company abandons Google Maps and goes another direction. As my good friends at Google are quick to point out, these companies are either small or the total numbers just don’t register. Well how about this news from foursquare?

Starting today, we’re embracing the OpenStreetMap movement, so all the maps you see when you go to foursquare.com will look a tiny bit different (we think the new ones are really pretty). Other than slightly different colors and buttons, though, foursquare is still the same site you know and love.

Sounds like they did this on a dare, but were quite surprised to see how easy it was and the results were more than they had before. Oh and the stack? OpenStreetMap, Leaflet and MapBox. Right? Where have we seen that before? Oh right, just about everywhere in the past 6 months.

They are utilizing MapBox Streets which the team from Development Seed announced earlier this week.http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.mapbox-streets.html#14.00/33.421111/-111.931667
And it isn’t just foursquare using MapBox, but many others.

The’ve got a great webpage up explaining how to get started using MapBox Streets and Leaflet. You should check it out.

“Let my mappers go!”