New Hamptons Snapchat Gets Competitive

Over the past few days, the 51-mile stretch of beaches and villages from Westhampton to Montauk has erupted in fierce competition, and spilled blood seems inevitable. Friendships have been tested, and only the driven and persistent players will emerge victorious.

Snapchat, a social media platform for sending videos and photos to select friends, has just introduced a Hamptons Snapchat story—a reel of photos and videos submitted by users in the area that is curated by Snapchat employees.

Being featured on the community story has become a point of contention among some local Snapchat users. Envy has invaded the East End’s Snapchat community, and it is beginning to cause quite the stir.

“I mean, yeah, I get jealous when I see that a friend made it on the story and I didn’t,” Southampton native Sarah Kirshy said. “I probably will avoid them for a few days because of it. Mine was better, you know?”

The concept for the story is pretty simple. You must have been in the Hamptons in the past 24 hours to be granted viewing access to the exclusive collection of snaps. While here, you have the opportunity to upload photos and videos of your Hamptons jaunts to the story.

Snapchat employees in New York and California offices sort through the countless entries and choose submissions they find interesting, and that fit an attempted story arch. The story accumulates photos and videos throughout the day, which any Snapchat user in the area can view.

The story appeared on the popular app just days before Memorial Day weekend, the symbolic inauguration of the summer season. It has been jam-packed with videos of Coopers Beach in Southampton and countless photos of sunsets from different vantage points along the South Fork. Snapchatters have been videographing from the sky, in planes and helicopters, and from the water, on Jet Skis and boats. Swerving drivers are a norm as of late—could be attributed to unpracticed, Manhattan-based part-timers, or determined amateur filmmakers shooting their latest Snapchat masterpieces from behind the wheel.

In addition to the advent of the Hamptons story, Snapchat has just bolstered its user arsenals with a new Hamptons geotag, a digital sticker that can be added to photos and videos to inform your followers of your location.

And unlike last summer, the geotags are now available in every Hampton—even those west of the canal.