Instagram this week fired the latest shot in the social mapping wars. It announced Instagram Map, a social mapping tool that resembles Snap Map in arraying content and friend updates on a Mapping UI. This is the latest in a string of Instagram moves that built up to this point (more on those in a bit).
The way Instagram Map works from a user perspective is that they can opt in to share their location. Sharing is off by default, which is a good privacy-first move. To that end, it also registers the location where users are standing when they open the app only – as opposed to live location updates.
In addition to displaying users’ locations – meant to be a social stimulant for friends to serendipitously meet in the real world – their content can also be appended to the map. For example, if they post a story while at a music festival, that story can be found on the map in addition to friends’ home feeds.
Users can also leave ‘notes’ for one another, which are direct messages pinned to a map location. This could be things like menu suggestions or local insider knowledge. Like the core location sharing feature, this is meant to spark serendipitous encounters when you step into a specific neighborhood.
Formal & Federated
Altogether, Instagram Map takes the app’s social graph and wraps a mapping interface around it. Put another way, Instagram has always been a discovery engine that’s based on behavioral and contextual relevance. Now, an additional relevance trigger joins the mix: location. This is the Snap Map playbook.
But how did we get here? Back to Instagram’s short history in the mapping field, it has made a few moves that build up to this point. For background and historical context, let’s tug on that thread. One feature Instagram had for a while was a map UI that arrayed posts, based on where they were created.
Then, in 2022, it built on that framework by placing not only posts on a map but contents of posts. In other words, businesses or points of interest tagged in a given Instagram post were put on the map. In addition to a geo-oriented way to browse Instagram, this helped Meta build up its places database.
Then, last Fall, Instagram launched a new feature that let users share their locations with friends via direct messages. Once received and accepted, the recipient could see the sender’s live location within Instagram’s mapping interface for up to an hour – similar to features in Google and Apple Maps.
This week’s move essentially takes all those features and formalizes them in Instagram Map. With that feaderated feature set and formal designation, Instagram is hoping to boost user engagement. If it can do that, it could open the door for Meta to monetize the experience through local business promotion.
Doing & Tagging
Stepping back to the macro view, the past few years have made it evident that everyone wants a piece of the local mapping pie. After years of dominance from Google – and notable ground gained by Apple over the past five years – we’re seeing challengers emerge from the social realm, such as Meta.
However, these challengers are building something fundamentally different than the traditional mapping model from Google Maps and Apple Maps. For example, social signals are the primary driver. It’s all about discovering things around you in the context of what friends are doing or tagging.
One could argue this provides an edge over Google and Apple. Though these incumbents have larger market shares and algorithmic competency, one thing they lack is social graphs for additional mapping dimension. Snap and Instagram recognize this edge and are building mapping strategies around it.
In fact, the value and differentiation of this “social layer” can be underscored by looking at Google’s many failed attempts to build a social graph (Google Wave, Google+, etc.). Google knows that social connections are a goldmine for inferring relevance and intent, which applies to local search and mapping.
But social players aren’t advantaged in every sense. Mapping perks and features mean nothing without the fundamentals. The primary success factor for mapping is to reliably get you to a destination, which requires years of development and accurate business listings. We’ll see if Instagram can pull that off.
