TikTok customers might quickly have entry to a 3rd part of their feed that will present native content material, because the platform is experimenting with a 3rd feed referred to as “Nearby.”

The characteristic is at present being examined in Southeast Asia, and customers who’re a part of the check will see this new tab beside the ‘For You’ and ‘Following’ web page, a TikTok spokesperson informed TechCrunch. The spokesperson additionally informed TechCrunch that this new feed can also be being examined with a characteristic that will permit customers to tag areas of their movies, and that this characteristic is being step by step rolled out to all customers.

Matt Navarra, a social media marketing consultant, first reported this new feature on Twitter, with Navarra writing in his tweet “TikTok is playing catch-up with Snapchat’s Snap map and Instagram’s recently launched searchable photo map feature.” Like Snapchat and Instagram, this new characteristic would give customers a brand new strategy to uncover new native locations. Though the brand new TikTok characteristic doesn’t appear to really embody a map at this level. The characteristic truly in use was then noticed by one other Twitter user. 

TikTok has already been competing with Google on the subject of trying to find merchandise or locations to go. “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram,” stated Prabhakar Raghavan, a Senior Vice President at Google at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech final month. This new characteristic has the potential to chop much more customers from Google.

A characteristic based mostly on location like this ‘Nearby’ feed would possible require customers to share their location with TikTok, so you’d be more likely to see common eating places, parks, mountain climbing trails, and many others. close by.

But for many who don’t share their location with the app, it’s unknown how the characteristic would search for them, and TikTok has but to answer Gizmodo’s request for clarification on this. An necessary factor to notice although, is that even when you will have your location off, TikTok will nonetheless estimate your location based mostly off of your community supplier, system info, and IP handle, in accordance with its website. Continuing, the web site additionally states that the IP handle “generally only allows us to estimate the country, region, or city where you may be located.” This additionally depends upon the way you entry TikTok. So perhaps this close by web page would look comparable to people who don’t share their location.

TikTok can also be at present growing a ‘Shop’ feed that will permit customers to discover completely different merchandise, although once more, it’s not clear how this would seem in your feed. TechCrunch confirmed that this feed is at present being examined in Indonesia. And relating to the ‘Nearby’ feed being examined, TikTok informed TechCrunch that the feed might change earlier than an official launch or simply be scrapped.