Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in someone else's life from your little corner of the world? With Snapchat's new Snap Maps feature, you can — Thankfully, figuring out how to find friends using Snap Maps is a piece of cake. With this new feature, you can plan a spontaneous date, stoke your FOMO fire, and keep tabs on your friends' whereabouts.
With new location-based features, you can see exactly what your Snapchat friends are doing as long as they have location enabled. Ever wonder if all your friends are hanging out without you? Well, wonder no more, my friends, because the map will pretty much tell you if there is a planned spontaneous gathering. (Your invitation must have been lost in Snap...) Snapchat has even found a way to show you what your friends are doing. Let’s say your friend is hanging out by the water in your rooftop pool. If they had targeting enabled, their Bitmoji might be wearing a bathing suit and holding a tiki drink.
But Snap Maps can be used not only to find friends, but also to find new experiences. With the Heat Map feature, you can explore the world through a catalog of snapshots collected at specific locations, whether it's your area or areas around the world you might want to explore. (But honestly, you'd probably use it for tracking.)
This map also takes covert tracking (harmless tracking, stupid!) to a whole new level. Keep an eye on your friends, kids or partner (or ex-partner... ) by scanning the map in ghost mode. When enabled, you can still see someone's location, but you won't appear on their map. Thanks to Snapchat for designing a virtual version hidden in the bushes. While it's great to browse hotspots on a global map, the real fun comes in following and chatting with friends.
1. Enable your location
To find friends using Snap Maps, you first need to enable your location. If you're doing some light crawling with snap maps, you'll want to stay in "ghost mode." If you don't mind your friends seeing where you post from, switch to the "My Friends" setting, which will show your location to everyone on your friends list. If you only want certain people to see your whereabouts, select the "Select Friends" option to choose who has access. Select the one you like and click "Next". This will take you to the snapshot map.
2. Find familiar faces
Once opened, Bitmoji for your location-enabled friends should start popping up, along with hotspots where multiple users have added Snaps to the larger Our Stories collection. This is where the fun begins! Click on your friends' Bitmoji to see what they're up to, send replies, and chat in real time.
Whenever you're ready to dive into the fun of Snap Maps, you'll want to start adding Snaps to your Our Stories collection. This will add your story to heat map hotspots on Snap Maps, which collect information around places, venues, and events. With this feature, you'll never have to ask " Was it fun? " or " Who was there? " before deciding whether to go out again.
3. Broaden your horizons
To use the map feature to see what's happening outside your circle of friends, use two fingers to zoom out of the Snap map and explore a larger area. From here, you should see new stories and snaps for the given location start to populate. Keep zooming out and you'll see snapshots from across an entire continent or around the world, along with background information about what's going on there (weather, temperature, etc.).
But trust me, Ghost Mode is where it comes in. Happy tracking!
