A snap of the State of the Union with a thumbs-down emoji can be a more effective way than a tweet-or worse, an essay-to communicate how much you hated it. Today, people increasingly use augmented videos and pictures to communicate emotions.

When the internet first became popular, dial-up connections were too slow to quickly send videos, GIFs, and photos.

Snap Maps on the web hopes to capitalize on a fundamental shift taking place in how we consume and communicate information online. That now carries over to Snapchat, with one important difference: The format is short videos instead of 280 characters. A hallmark feature of viral web stories in publications like Buzzfeed has always been the inclusion of a smattering of tweets or Facebook posts. It was easy to see the utility for news organizations, especially because embedding Snap Map stories feels like a new iteration of what reporters have done for years. I had a chance to try the new Snap Map at Snapchat’s offices in New York last week. Beginning today, Snap Map, which has 100 million monthly users, will exist outside of the Snapchat app on a dedicated website. On Monday, Snapchat announced a potential solution to that problem. Users could record or take photos of their screens to bring those videos to the wider internet, but there was no streamlined method. It presented a range of experiences and emotions, but little in the way of context, being divorced from the rest of the web. The problem: Snap Map lived exclusively inside Snapchat itself. Snap Map communicated the breadth of the disaster better than a slickly produced cable news broadcast ever could.

Houston residents began sharing raw, intimate footage of paddling in canoes, huddling in shelters, and their living rooms filling with water. But when Harvey hit, the map’s real utility became clear. Two months before the storm, the social media app had debuted Snap Map, a crowdsourced, interactive feature that displays what’s happening on Snapchat around the world.Īt launch, Snap Map seemed mostly like a fun toy, albeit one with potential privacy implications Snap Map can broadcast your location to your friends if you opt in. When Hurricane Harvey wreaked destruction in Houston last August, the country turned not just to cable television, but also to Snapchat.

Snapchat snap map