Last weekend, Snap launched its third annual Easter Egg Hunt with a 🔥custom style. In the past, the hunt encouraged users to physically run around and arrive in the location of the eggs before adding them to their Easter basket. This year, users could “Hunt from Home” by collecting eggs dispersed throughout the world with a simple tap, though the baskets and rabbits worth more points were significantly harder to find. While my fingers are exhausted from a lot of panning and zooming across the globe, I ended the weekend with an even greater understanding and appreciation for the realities and efforts happening around the world right now.

Snap Map is typically a place I turn to to understand shared experiences that I missed out on, or in some cases had no idea were happening at all — the gun control walkout at my high school in upstate NY, a Ben Folds concert in Australia, a fire in my neighborhood, or prayers around the sacred Kaaba at the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia. Popular events and breaking news are surfaced visually through a heat map and a collection of videos and photos submitted to the Snap public story. This weekend, in between gathering eggs, I saw and appreciated very different types of stories on the Snap heat map — home cooks in Tel Aviv sharing their (smaller than usual) Passover spreads, brothers boasting about their homemade protective face masks in Nairobi, and a nurse in New Jersey pleading for folks to stay home while using one of Snap’s specialty filters with World Health Organization facts.

It turns out that my exploration may have cost me some points on the Egg Hunt leaderboard, but I think it was worth it. While it can be challenging to reconcile what’s going on in the world right now, I’m grateful that for this weekend Snap allowed us to have a little holiday fun and to check in with how people around the globe are coping.

This year’s Egg Hunt may be behind us, but I still encourage you to explore the world with me on Snap Map!