Snapchat is about to get a lot more useful. The app is getting these so-called Context Cards, which are interactive cards that provide more information about the content of a Snap.
For example, a Snap shows pancakes from a certain pancake place. Audiences will be able to pull up Context Cards to get the pancake place's location, reserve a table, or book an Uber/Lyft ride to get there. Snaps added to the regional Our Story feature, or those tagged with venue-specific geofilters, will automatically include the said cards.
To bring this feature, Snapchat had to partner with a lot of third-party services, including Foursquare, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Uber, and Lyft. Snap says it'll be adding more services going forward, which certainly paints a bright future for Snapchat. If it can nail this third-party thing down, it stands to become somewhat similar to WeChat, China's "all-in-one" app.
"With Context Cards, Snaps have become the visual starting point for learning more about the world, empowering our community to get more information about anything that catches their eye," Snap Inc. says.
What Are Snapchat's Context Cards All About?
Those who use Google Maps will find these Context Cards familiar. They're similar to the bits of information that appear when a user taps a certain establishment or location, such as Walmart or Target. Snap's Context Cards, by comparison, will also offer addresses, contact numbers, and hours. For restaurants, especially, users can sort through user reviews crowdsourced form Snapchat's partners.
Some Context Cards also include public stories taken on that location, meaning users can see videos and images made by others about that place. Perhaps the most useful feature of these cards is their integration with ride-hailing services, though, allowing users to get a ride to reach the selected venue. Again, this is a promising implementation of third-party services, one that could help Snapchat take back its momentum from Facebook's Instagram Stories, widely regarded as a Snapchat clone.
Rollout And Availability
Context Cards is the latest addition to Snapchat following Snap Maps, which allows users to see their friends' location in real time and adds a heat map of public Snaps. This feature helped increase contributions to public Stories by nearly 40 percent, Axios reported last week.
Context cards are slowly rolling out for iOS and Android in these countries: United States, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
See it in action:
