Snapchat redesign focuses on ‘separating the social from the media’

Now, swiping to the left on the camera will bring up a list of friends, organised by who you talk to the most.

Snap announced today (Nov. 29), that it was rolling out a redesign for Snapchat that’s meant to separate users’ feeds between their friends from the brands that publish content on the app.

The news comes shortly after Snap posted its Q3 2017 earnings report that highlighted the company’s dire financial year so far.

Snapchat is rolling out a redesign which aims to draw a more distinct line between your friends’ Stories and those of publishers. “They’re relationships. That’s why today we’re separating the “social” from the ‘media'”.

“We began commercial operations in 2011 and for all of our history we have experienced net losses and negative cash flows from operations”, Snap said in its regulatory filing with the SEC for its IPO listing earlier this year.

The new Snapchat is available for download starting today. Snapchat says that this will become more personalized the more a person uses it. Content from influencers, users Snapchat long shied away from formally interacting with, will appear as Popular Stories.

The most recent US election is proof of this divide, and many people were fed up seeing their Twitter or Facebook news feeds full of political content.

“When we first built Snapchat, we made it easier to express yourself by talking with pictures”, Spiegel explained in a video.

Snapchat is going to sport a very different look. In terms of sheer numbers, that’s the generation that most companies want to be a … It will also include recommended content for the user. The company said it hopes to make the Discover page easier for partners to distribute their content and make money off of the platform.

In addition, the update will also reinstate the Stories auto-advance feature that so many users bemoaned the loss of late previous year.

Now, when you finish watching one Story, Snap will show a brief interstitial screen with the name and a preview of the next friend’s Story. While some believe this is the right move for the company in the wake of “Fake News” and internet trolls, others still believe that Spiegel might not be suited to run this company.

Implied in all of this is, if you don’t want to deal with all of the corporate bullshit when checking your friends’ Stories, you won’t have to anymore.