Redesigned Snapchat App Separating the Social from the Media

Snapchat’s newly-redesigned app is separating the social from the media, creating two distinct content pages, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.

A new report from Recode details the features of the newly-redesigned app and how it works, and according to the article, the “app is not that different, but now the personal and the professional part ways.”

Unless you are a regular Snapchat user, the app may not look significantly different. The app’s most basic functionalities – taking and sending a Snap or finding friends – hasn’t really changed.

The redesigned app does introduce a few new changes, including the elimination of the Stories page as well as the return of auto-advance for stories created by users. Most importantly, however, the app now makes a clear separation between how users communicate with their friends on a personal basis and how users interact with media.

One of the main changes is the removal of the Stories page, as now “all private messages and user stories will now exist together on a “Friends” screen when you swipe right off the camera.” This means that Snapchat is making an effort to separate content from a user’s friends from professional media content.

Snapchat is also bringing back the auto-advance feature for friends’ Stories, meaning that after viewing a story from one of your friends, a user simply has to tap the screen if he or she wants to watch the next story in the queue.

Snapchat is also updating its algorithms to better personalize what users see on the app. “Your Friends will be listed in the order that you want to talk to them,” the company wrote on its blog. The company is also adding a new algorithm for users to discover content in their news feeds, claiming its significantly better than what it had been using before.

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Finally, Snapchat is adding new and more varied content inside the Discover tab, allowing users to more effectively find content that they enjoy. In addition to the traditional professional publisher content, Snap will now put popular events inside Discover that you can find from the company’s maps product.

Overall, these are quite significant changes for Snapchat, an app that certainly needed a bit of spiffing up. The new version of the app will start rolling out to a small group of Snapchat users this week, and will reach all of Snap’s users worldwide in the coming weeks, the company said.

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