Snapchat launches 'Snap Map' for sharing location with friends

Snapchat has launched 'Snap Map', a new feature that lets you share your location with friends. The map allows users to zoom out to their neighborhood, city, country, and even continent to see where their other Snapchat friends are located. Well, that's not all; you can also view snaps of events and breaking news taking place around the world.

“We’ve built a whole new way to explore the world! See what’s happening, find your friends, and get inspired to go on an adventure!,” Snap wrote in its blogpost.

For those who do not want to share their location, Snapchat is including a "Ghost Mode." Notably, the location is updated only when you open the app — so there shouldn’t be any background tracking to worry about. In fact, if you don’t open the app for several hours, your Bitmoji will disappear from the map rather than reflect a long-since-changed location.

To access the Snap Map, you pinch on your Snapchat camera home screen. From there you can scroll around to see where friends are in your city or around the world. Tapping on their BitMoji avatar opens their Story to show what they’re up to, or lets you message them directly to make meetup plans.

The Snap Map also shows where the snaps being shared to the collaborative “Our Story” originate from. And the heat zones on the map represent areas where a lot of those snaps are being taken.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch says that Snapchat's latest feature comes courtesy its acquisition of social mapping startup Zenly. The Paris-based startup app that reportedly has 4 million downloads would be run independently, similar to how Facebook lets Instagram run independently.

Snap Map in Snapchat is available on iOS and Android devices starting today.