Earlier this summer, Twitter announced a new feature called Stickers, which lets users decorate their photos with animated, well, stickers. It was a move that made the internet collectively pause, scratch their heads, and ask, “Hey, isn’t that exactly what Snapchat does?” (Answer: Yes.)
Not to be outdone, today Snapchat released Geostickers, which are only accessible when users are in certain cities. (Similar to the way Snapchat’s geofilters are only available within certain location parameters.) Currently, Snapchatters will find Geostickers if they open the app in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris, and Riyadh. They can be sent in chat messages or used to decorate snaps, provided users have location services enabled on their phones.
While the stickers themselves are fairly unimaginative — a sloth climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a mouse in a Queen’s Guard uniform in London — it’s another power move from Snapchat, since it is the first among its social competitors to roll out this kind of feature. Now it’s only a question of who will copy it first: Twitter or Instagram.
