Built from the ground up
About a month ago, I made the observation that Snap Maps may turn out to be a success because of GeoFilters.
I was actively checking it everyday, browsing around to see what was going on and I was pretty excited by what I saw, especially from the local news perspective.
But then recently, I saw Sandi MacPherson’s tweet about how she loved Snap Maps. It made me realize that I was no longer using it as often and that my interest had waned.
So I began to wonder, why did it wane for me? How was my experience different from Sandi’s? But then, MG’s blog post yesterday gave me the insight.
The key quote from the article that made me realize what had happened was this:
I don’t care if that’s what the data says people use it for, it’s not what it actually is. Because it wasn’t built to be that from the ground up. And so tacking on something like Stories is Frankenstein-ing your product.
What happened was that I was looking at Snap Maps through lens of location and maps, which is what I had spent over a decade of my career working on. I saw the potential from that perspective, but Snap Chat is not inherently about location or maps. It was built from the ground up to be social and in order to succeed in social you have to be, well… social.
Shocker, huh? If you look at Sandi’s tweet again, you’ll see that she has lots of friends sharing their location and she herself is not ghosted. But if you look at my map, you’ll see that I have only one friend who has a Bitmoji, another who does not have a Bitmoji and looks like a chalk outline at a murder scene, and myself who is ghosted. My Snap Map looks pretty lonely and pathetic.
Given that Snap Chat is at it’s core a social product, the element that will make a feature succeed must be social. To bring this point home even more, here is a great quote from Kevin Systrom in a Recode profile earlier this year.
“Your connections with your friends and your family are the thing that make Instagram work,” Systrom, 33, explained from Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters late last month. “All the data supports that if you follow more friends and engage with your friends, your activity goes through the roof. If you just follow more celebrity content or more interest-based content, that doesn’t move the needle at all.”
I think this will be the case for Snap Maps, it will need to be the connections to your friends that will make it work, not the content on the map like local news or events nearby because Snap Chat was built as a social product from the ground up, not as a local discovery tool, and location sharing is the means to make those connections with friends happen.
But the major hurdle that Snap Maps will have to overcome is that for many people (including myself) location sharing can be scary and undesirable.
If location sharing does not get wide adoption, then I believe that they will need to find some other way to connect friends through location that everybody will be willing to use without hesitation in order for Snap Maps to succeed.
