Snapchat launches location-sharing feature Snap Map

Snapchat’s next huge function desires to  Vlogger Faire get you to meet up with buddies in actual existence in preference to simply looking at each different’s lives on your phones. Snap Map helps you share your current place, which seems to friends on a map and updates simultaneously as you open Snapchat. It’s rolling out nowadays to all iOS and Android customers globally.

“We’ve built a completely new way to explore the arena! See what’s occurring, discover your pals, and get stimulated to move on an adventure!” Snap writes on its weblog.

[Update: Snap Map was based on Snapchat’s secret acquisition of social map app Zen for $250 million to $350 million. Please read our full story on Snap’s acquisition of Zen here.]

Snapchat

How to use Snapchat’s Snap Map

When you open Snapchat as quickly as you’ve got access to the feature, you could pick out to percent your location with all your buddies, a few pals you select out, or you may disappear from the map at any time by going into Ghost Mode or not setting out Snapchat for some hours. Alternatively, location-sharing is becoming off through default, and you can depart in that manner to lurk, looking at what friends are up to.

To access the Snap Map, you pinch to your Snapchat digital camera home display. From there, you may scroll round to look where buddies are in your city or around the sector. Tapping on their “ActionMoji” BitMoji avatar opens their Story to reveal what they’re as tons as, or helps you to message them right now to make meetup plans. Snapchat mechanically picks and ActionMoji for you based on your place, time of day, and various factors.

Outside of the area sharing detail, Snap Map gives customers a possible way to discover Story content material cloth beyond the nicely-worn Stories feed and the effective but buried Story Search feature. Users can publish Snapchat Story posts to Our Story to be eligible for their content material to appear to non-pals for around 24 hours. You can also see “heat” shades on the Snap Map to look wherein loads of Snaps are being uploaded, which would possibly mean a stay overall performance or big event from that you’d want to find out Snap Stories.

Snap tells me that Snap Map is designed for enhancing connections among humans and their closest buddies — engagement that makes up nearly 60 percent of interactions on Snapchat constant with data from Sparkler that modified into the commissioned employing manner of Snap.

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These new methods to ground content material cloth could earn Snapchat extra money with the aid of a way of getting users to take a look at extra Snaps, even though they’re not looking for to fulfill up with pals. However, for now, Snap tells me there gained’t be any commercials at the Snap Map. If you know a cluster of content material labeled Featured, that easy technique is curated through Snapchat’s crew and will appear in the Discover segment properly.

Overall, Snap Map creates a low-friction manner to an appearance in which your Snap-addicted friends are and what they’re up to. While no longer as unique as a real-time region-sharing feature, it’s additionally lots, much less probably to creep humans out.

Snapchat launches location-sharing feature Snap Map 47

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[Update: Snapchat appeared to have copied social map startup Zen for this feature, but now we’ve learned that Snap Inc has acquired Zen for $250 million to $350 million in mostly cash and some stock. Snap will keep Zen running independently, similar to how Facebook runs Instagram independently. Please read our full story on Snap’s acquisition of Zen here.]

John R. Wright
Social media ninja. Freelance web trailblazer. Extreme problem solver. Music fanatic. Spent several months marketing pubic lice in the financial sector. Spent 2002-2008 supervising the production of ice cream in Africa. Had some great experience developing robotic shrimp in the aftermarket. Spent several years getting my feet wet with puppets in Miami, FL. Was quite successful at supervising the production of corncob pipes worldwide. What gets me going now is working with electric trains in Mexico.