Microsoft has announced several new features in its Bing Maps service, including Foursquare Everywhere and a significant addition to its imagery data.
The Foursquare update, according to Matt McGee of Search Engine Land, will add "Foursquare data into Bing Maps to show checkins, tips, badges, mayorships, and so forth from Foursquare’s API. Bing says this is rolling out in stages, so some users may not see it yet in the applications gallery."
Additionally, McGee writes, Microsoft has added 2.4 million square miles of image data into Bing, and given the option of taking the Bing Maps World Tour, which takes users through all of the new image data added to the maps service since its inception in August 2009.
The improved integration of Foursquare into Bing Maps, experts say, may be the most important of the additions. As localization functionality continues to become more and more important – thanks to the growth in internet-enabled smartphone use – such features will be crucial to future search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
