If you’re in awe of your cool friends Snapchat stories and want to be part of the action, you can be. Snapchat’s new Snap Maps will tell you exactly where your friends are.

Snapchat’s latest feature lets you share your location with your Snapchat friends. You can also see their location on a map.

The new feature is now available today to all iOS and Android Snapchat users across the globe.

Snap Map

Now you can see exactly where your Snapchat friends are hanging out and what they are doing there if they have shared it as a story.

Snapchat released the update saying on their blog:

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!”

How to get Snap Map

All you have to do is open Snapchat and open the camera as if to Snap.

Then, pinch the screen, or do a zoom out touch motion with your fingers, and you can view the Snap Map.

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You can view the map and allow friends to see your location, and story if you have posted one at the location you took it.

Alternatively you can search the map in ‘Ghost mode’. When this is enabled your friends will not be able to see your location, but you can see theirs.

This is a bit stalker-y if you ask me.

You can also upload Snapchats to ‘Our Story’ and these will then be available for the public to watch based on the location where they were uploaded.

Once your friends are sharing their location with you you will see their Actionmoji (Bitmoji) on the Map .

As ever Snapchat is prepared to protect you from your annoying ex, over-friendly boss, or tech savvy mother. You can choose which friends you want to share your location with, and which friends you don’t.

You will automatically be turned on ‘Ghost mode’ if you have been inactive on the app for a couple of hours.

Of course, the feature doesn’t work unless you have your location sharing settings on.

Events

One good thing is that you can drop in on events all over the world.

For example, it’s Glastonbury this weekend so just scroll over to Glastonbury and watch what is happening.

If Royal Ascot is more your thing, just head on over on the Snap Map.

A cluster of story content titled ‘Featured’ means it was curated by the snap team and signals a large planned event. You can see Ed Sheeran is a featured happening, above. There’s also Kraftwerk generating a hot spot.

You can see areas of activity almost like a heat map on the app. Just click to see what stories people are uploading in that area. This might point to a special event or something happening right now that you need to know about. This could be a way of getting breaking news stories.

Zenly

Snap Map has no doubt appeared thanks to Snapchat’s secret acquisition of social map app Zenly.

Zenly is a social mapping startup which makes “it fun and easy to know what your friends and family are up to” and will be run independently of Snapchat even after the acquisition.