Today we’re announcing a new and improved Snapchat - organized around your relationships and personalized just for you!

Until now, social media has always mixed photos and videos from your friends with content from publishers and creators. While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves.

The new Snapchat separates the social from the media. This means that the Chats and Stories from your friends are on the left side of Snapchat, and the Stories from publishers, creators, and the community are on the right.

We’ve also invented something new to make Snapchat feel even more personal: the dynamic Friends page. The new Friends page to the left of the camera displays your friends based on the way you communicate with them.

You can think of it as a more sophisticated Best Friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them. We’ve all had the frustrating experience of scrolling endlessly through our Chats to find the right person - now your Friends will be listed in the order that you want to talk to them. It might take a little while for the Friends page to learn the best way to display your Friends, but the results are worth it!

The new Discover page to the right of the camera includes Stories from publishers, creators, and the community. Your subscriptions live at the top, followed by other Stories you might be interested in watching. Over time, Discover will become uniquely personalized for you. While the Stories on Discover are personalized algorithmically, our curators review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page. We believe that this balance of human review and machine personalization provides the best content experience on mobile.

And, as always, Snapchat opens to the Camera, making it the fastest way to share a moment with friends.

Separating social from media has allowed us to build the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content - while addressing many of the problems that plague the Internet today.

We hope you enjoy these changes as much as we do - it’s a whole new Snapchat!

Happy Snapping!

Love, Team Snap