It’s on a different level than just being at home with friends from high school. Sure, it’s great to feel quite ~cosmopolitan~ when you see you truly have friends in different area codes, but their respective precise locations probably didn’t mean much to you at the time - other than from a macro point of view for bragging about how cultured you are after going to such a large, well-known school.Īll of your friends from school being back in State College for the school year is a game-changer, though. Unless you were here for summer session, however, one aspect of Snap Maps that didn’t get much attention was their role in a college setting. Bitmojis of all shapes and sizes were scattered throughout Pennsylvania, across the country, and around the world. Research shows that Snapchat is still hugely popular with teens, so the app clearly knows what it’s doing.When Snapchat debuted the widely polarizing Snap Maps over the summer, many users were able to actually see how geographically diverse their friendships from college were. Time will tell.Įither way, it does seem like a fairly minor addition, and it is oddly timed, given Instagram’s big announcements.īut what else can Snap do? The platform is always going to be compared to Facebook and its offshoots, and that comparison will always favor Facebook on user counts.

Maybe, given its young user base, Snapchat users will welcome the more playful Maps element. Maybe, in those cases, such animations won’t quite fit.īut then again, Snapchat has repeatedly shown its audience nous, its capacity for tapping into cool trends and making them mainstream. That, and the fact that Snap Maps has also become a key resource for those looking for on-the-ground coverage of events like natural disasters or mass shootings. Of course, with more people increasingly concerned about their privacy, Snap Maps is probably not the best feature to be highlighting right now.

Snapmaps