With Snap Maps, Snapchat wants to distinguish itself from Instagram. User stories are displayed on a world map – a playful approach to keep young users in a good mood. Now, there have been some first attempts by app developers to offer a map for Instagram as well.
More clarity, playful approach, gamification – with Snap Maps, Snapchat has seen a lot of young users engage with the app. At the very least, Snapchat groups were full of users sending add requests to chat on the maps.
InstaMap: A week’s development
Instagram does not offer such a function yet, but it is probably only a matter of time. In the meantime, app developers have adopted a transition solution. With InstaMap, the team around David Parshenkov has released an iOS app that can do exactly what Snap Maps can do: display stories on a world map.
According to Parshenkov, the development time was only a week – a blog post said. It was developed in airports, on airplanes, in the subway in New York City and at the Starbucks near the Facebook office in New York. Parshenkov and his team have therefore, according to their own statement, developed many ideas on this subject.
No user search, only location tags
So there is no user search. After a login via Instagram, the only stories visible are from one’s own contacts anyway. In addition, only those that contain a location tag are visible. For non-logged in users, there are only a few stories of celebrities and Instagram itself.
Parshenkov also refers to Instagram itself, which offers this functionality in parts.
If you click on a location tag in an Instagram story, for example, a map with the location opens. InstaMap wants to raise this kind of view to a slightly larger and easier level.
Beautiful is different
If you click on a profile then you get a view of the story. In addition, there is a scroll view to jump from user to user. All this still seems very rudimentary.
The app is not nice, but in the end, it works.
If you can’t do without Snap Maps on Instagram, you can look at InstaMap in the iOS app store. For everyone else, want to bet whether Instagram will keep upgrading over the next few weeks?
By the way: You can find us on Instagram here.
