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When Snap Map first launched within the Snapchat app, it was met with a mix of curiosity and privacy concerns. Yet, this integrated feature has quietly become a significant success story, particularly among its core demographic – Millennials. While perhaps not always the focus of mainstream tech commentary, Snap Map has proven to be far more than just a simple location-sharing tool; it’s a dynamic social and discovery platform that resonates strongly with this generation.

Snap Map’s genius lies in how it caters to Millennials, a generation that grew up alongside the internet and the rise of social media. It transforms the static concept of a map into a vibrant, real-time representation of their social world. Users can see cartoon-like “Actionmojis” of their friends’ Bitmojis placed on a map, indicating their general location and what they might be doing (based on factors like speed or time of day).

This real-time social layer is incredibly powerful for Millennials. It facilitates spontaneous meetups (“Oh, you’re nearby? Let’s grab coffee!”), provides a sense of connection to friends scattered across a city or even the globe (“Just checking in on what everyone’s up to”), and subtly fuels that ever-present fear of missing out (FOMO) in a visually engaging way. It’s not just about knowing where someone is, but feeling connected to their immediate reality and potential activities, aligning with the Millennial desire for authentic, in-the-moment experiences.

Beyond the social aspect, Snap Map has evolved into a powerful discovery engine. Heatmaps appear on the map, indicating areas where a lot of Snapchat activity is happening – be it a major concert, a local festival, or just a popular hangout spot. Millennials can tap on these areas or specific locations to view public Snaps submitted by people at that place, offering a ground-level view of events and environments as they unfold. This transforms the map into a living, breathing news feed of local happenings, curated by the community itself, perfect for a generation keen on exploring and experiencing their surroundings.

For Millennials, Snap Map integrates seamlessly into their existing Snapchat habits. Checking the map becomes as natural as viewing stories or sending snaps. It leverages the platform’s visual language and social graph to create a unique, engaging experience that keeps users within the app longer and reinforces their connection to their friends and their local environment.

A Different Kind of Local Search: Competing with Giants?

While Google Maps remains the undisputed king of navigation and comprehensive business listings, Snap Map presents an interesting, albeit different, form of local search and discovery, particularly for its core Millennial audience. Traditional platforms excel at providing structured information: business hours, reviews, directions, and contact details. Snap Map, on the other hand, competes by offering something more experiential and immediate.

Instead of searching for a restaurant’s phone number, a Millennial user might check Snap Map’s heatmaps to see what’s buzzing in a particular neighborhood, or tap on a location to see real-time Snaps from inside a bar or event. This provides an authentic, user-generated glimpse into the current vibe, crowd, and activities happening at a place – information that static listings often can’t convey. It’s less about finding information about a place and more about experiencing what’s happening there right now.

For a generation that values experiences and peer validation, seeing friends or other users actively sharing moments from a location can be a powerful motivator to visit. Snap Map’s local discovery is inherently social and visually driven, offering a complementary, and sometimes even preferred, way for Millennials to decide where to go and what to do, especially for social outings and events. While it won’t replace the need for navigation or detailed business info, Snap Map carves out its niche by offering a dynamic, community-powered lens on the local world, posing a subtle, experience-focused challenge to traditional local search paradigms.

While it may fly under the radar for those outside the typical Snapchat demographic, Snap Map’s ability to blend real-time location data with social interaction and content discovery has made it a sticky, successful feature that significantly contributes to the overall appeal and utility of the Snapchat platform for millions of Millennials worldwide. It’s a prime example of how location services, when designed with a specific user base and their social behaviors in mind, can become incredibly compelling.

For people of my generation the term Splat will always be associated with the Saturday Morning Children’s TV show ‘Tiswas” and was to the result of someone getting a “custard pie” in their face…

Now the hot topic in 3D Geospatial rendering are Gaussian Splats..

In Geospatial 3D, Gaussian splats are used as for rendering and representing surfaces, particularly in point-based rendering techniques. Unlike traditional polygon-based methods, which use vertices and edges to define a surface, Gaussian splats represent the surface as a collection of points or particles, each with an associated Gaussian function.

This function is typically a bell-shaped curve, which spreads out in space, creating a smooth, continuous representation of the surface.

The advantage of Gaussian splats is that they can represent complex, organic shapes and soft surfaces without the need for explicit mesh structures, as a result this is an alternative to most of the 3D techniques used in Geospatial Technology so far..

Moreover, Gaussian splats are valuable in managing large datasets, such as those found when working with large point clouds. Since each splat is a smooth approximation of the surface at that point, it allows for efficient rendering, even with millions of points.

Overall, Gaussian splats provide a flexible and efficient approach to 3D rendering, offering smooth approximations of surfaces with minimal computational overhead.

To try out both the capture and rendering abilities of Gaussian Splats I used the recently developed iPhone App Scaniverse from Niantic (yes the Pokemon GO people!) on a riverside walk to capture a large sculpture at Runnymede on the banks of the River Thames called “The Jurors”. The scan using my iPhone took about 5 minutes and the results are very impressive.

This is still very early days for the technology, but it’s nice to see some innovation in the 3D visualisation space, Niantic have a vision to map the world using Scaniverse, that’s quite a challenge but then so was Google Earth !

It was a great pleasure to spend half a hour talking with my friend Jerry Brotton on his excellent History of Maps podcast, “What’s Your Map“. This excellent podcast series cover the history of cartography by getting people to select a single map to place it’s significance in the development of mapping.

The podcast is supported by the wonderful Oculi Mundi a digital heritage website which is the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge.

My map is he ‘Christian Knight Map’, produced by Jodocus Hondius in 1597, and the first map to use Mercator’s Projection after the death of its inventor, Gerard Mercator.

Now today the Mercator projection is the subject of much criticism, mostly as a result of it’s misuse and no doubt the impact of a episode of the much loved “West Wing” TV show which featured a group of cartographers lobbying the President to ban it’s use !

I make the point in the podcast that beyond any issues of “Social Equality” the projection certainly had many advantages in the early days of web mapping when the size of Greenland did not seem to matter…

Well…