Use openstreetmap to locate objects

I am very impressed by the development of openstreetmap. I am thankful for all the hardworking members and your valuable contribution and time to make this a success and FREE.
Well, I am not a programmer but I am working with a programmer to help me develop a social site for my classmates. I have looked at the google map, and very interested in one of the sample applications as shown through the link below;
http://www.mibazaar.com/unsafecities

What I want(as an administrator of the site) to be able to place symbols/and popup screens on locations where members are, so when the user click on a listed name(as shown on the above link) it places a symbol on their location with the popup window. Google map could be used but their map does not give detail street level of all regions examples street level maps in most African cities. So since people like you devoting your time to give much detail/accurate maps I would prefer to use the openstreet map for the application with credits to openstreetmap.

Can someone give me step by step application in implementing this(I’m not talking about the code(although I would welcome it), but word explanation of steps to make this happen). I will give this imformation to my friend who is doing the programming (java, and the rest),
Thanks for all the good work.

I can promise you that we are not at that detaillevel yet for most African cities, nor the South American supercities.

You can use our maps for what you describe, just use Openlayers AJAX gui, and your own database. Possibly you could tell you programmers to use OSMXAPI, and put all your data in out DB but that is possibly volatile since anyone can change it.

I know you can use Google to publish informational maps, with your own data overlayn, that you create and store on Google as well. You can do this with openstreetmap with some hacking, but it’s not recommended atm…

Have a nice one /emj

PS Our Free, but low detail map of Sao Paulo is a good example, even though it’s one of the good ones. DS.