Snap Map adds 'My Places' for a Google Maps feel
What if Google Maps, but more Snapchat?
That's what the new "My Places" feature on the disappearing messaging app's map feels like. My Places, which starts rolling out Wednesday around the world, makes it easier to remember and discover nearby restaurants, bars, and new, well, places. The new map option is already in testing with a small group of users.
Once available, the feature will pop up on the Snap Map, which lets you see publicly available Snaps from around the globe. It's sort of like a heat map, with hot spots literally appearing brighter and redder. Tokyo, for example, is full of Snaps right now because the Olympics are currently underway.
But with My Places, you'll see more than short videos of Olympians posted on the Snap Map; you'll also be able to store away places to eat, drink, and explore in three new tabs: Popular, Favorites, and Visited.
The Visited tab collects all the places you've checked into when you tagged them in a Snap. Favorites are places you've liked with the heart icon on the pop-up description of a restaurant, hotel, landmark, or other attraction. (Currently, there's no way to differentiate between a favorite marking for a place you've tried and loved, and a place you'd like to try.)
When I clicked on the Popular tab under places on the Snap Map while "in" Tokyo, it pulled up a park, a coffee shop, and a shopping mall as suggested places to check out. As more people use the new My Places features, these curated recommendations will be based not only on your past visits and preferences, but on those of your friends and strangers around you.
Already, location tags are available on Snapchat for more than 30 million businesses, and all of those places will be ready to favorite or check into. For the Popular tab, Snapchat's algorithm will try to surface more restaurants and bars to make sure other "popular" check-ins, like airports, don't come up as suggested locations.
The new Snap Map features feel like a way to keep you in the social app instead of popping over to Google Maps, where shareable lists, saved locations, and check-ins have been popular features for years.
Bryant Detwiller, Snap Map group product manager, acknowledged this recent change in focus, saying over email that the company is "evolving Snap Map from a product that helps you stay in touch with friends, to a map that helps you find things to do together."
The rollout of My Places is the start of what seems to be a multi-staged approach to making Snap Map more of an all-in-one service while keeping users in the app longer.
Layers, another new Snap Map feature which was announced in May and is coming soon, will let users book concert tickets at nearby venues and look up reviews for restaurants — all without leaving Snapchat.
Layers won't be available on the app until later this year, however. When it does launch, it'll kick off with a partnership with Ticketmaster and restaurant review site The Infatuation.
Those two "layers" will be the only in-app options for now, but eventually you may never have to leave Snap Map. Add in "My Places" with all of your favorites saved and your Google Maps lists might fall to the wayside.