Instagram this week fired the latest shot in the ongoing social mapping wars. Users can now share their locations with friends via direct messages. Once those messages are received and activated, the recipient can see the sender’s live location within Instagram’s mapping feature for up to an hour.
The idea is that this is a tool for tracking someone’s ETA with their permission if they’re in transit to meet in the physical world. It’s also a good feature for friends and family to share locations for security or peace-of-mind awareness during travel or other transitory contexts. Other use cases will follow.
As for escalating the mapping wars, we frame it that way because Instagram and Snap continue to roll out new features in their mapping functions. In fact, Snapchat launched a similar location-sharing feature just last month. Known as Footsteps, it not only shares location but can log one’s travels for posterity.
More broadly speaking, the location-sharing features of both social players are a shot at Apple’s longstanding Find My app, which has a certain advantage in its on-deck integration in iPhones. And Google Maps has long offered a location-sharing to let friends and family know your live coordinates.
Relevance Trigger
To be fair, this isn’t Instagram’s first foray into social mapping, and this move could be expected – not just because Snapchat recently did something similar. Clues around Instagram’s social mapping ambitions are all around us, including code that was discovered last year around its “Friend Map.”
Other clues could be seen in Instagram’s corporate cousin, WhatsApp, where live location sharing has been offered for a while. Instagram’s location-sharing feature will be slightly different from WhatsApp (as well as Snapchat and Apple for that matter) in that the sharing time horizon is only an hour.
As for the UX particulars, users can choose to share their live location with one person, or with a group. The latter can be activated from within an existing group chat to make it easy. Users can share with the whole group in just a few taps. This could be useful when a given group is meeting up somewhere locally.
All in all, Instagram’s mapping moves take its social graph and wrap a mapping UX around it. Put another way, Instagram has always been a discovery engine, based on behavioral and contextual relevance. Now an additional relevance trigger joins the mix: location. This could pave the way for local monetization.
Bells & Whistles
Stepping back, it seems that everyone wants a piece of the local mapping action. After years of dominance from Google Maps, we’re seeing challengers in Apple Maps and Snap Map. These each have their own set of advantages including Apple’s iOS on-deck positioning and integration as noted earlier.
But Instagram (and Snap for that matter) is building something fundamentally different from 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.
This could provide a bit of 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 (Google has sure tried). Snap and Instagram recognize this edge and are leaning into it.
But social players aren’t advantaged in every sense. Mapping bells & whistles means nothing if the map itself isn’t functional. The primary success factor for online mapping is to find what you’re looking for, which requires years of development and accurate business listings. We’ll see if Instagram can get there.
