TomTom announced a new feature called MapShare on Wednesday. It allows drivers to capture changes in the road attributes that aren't reflected in the map data. The first look at what it is can be seen in the GPSPassion Forums including some screen shots of the UI. The press release has a lot of marketing-speak but the screen shots give a clue what they're doing. Drivers can edit map attributes and POI's but not road geometry. So it's not exactly OpenStreetMaps but it's a very interesting start. More interesting would be what TomTom will do with the data and the extent to which they will share the changes with the map data suppliers. I suspect they won't but that leaves the issue of who will validate the changes. That's a massive effort that TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ do very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
It's another step in bringing customers what they've been saying they want for a long time: up-to-date maps. Kudos to TomTom for this innovation.