• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 1, 2015

For many users, having to press and hold their screens to view content is far from intuitive. Acknowledging that fact, Snapchat will now let users simply tap to view Snaps and Stories.

“This means no more tired thumbs while watching a several-hundred-second Story,” the company writes in a new blog post.

Snapchat this week is also adding new ways to make friends on the service, including “Add Nearby.”

“It’s a quick way to add a group of friends when you’re all hanging out together,” Snapchat explains. “If everyone opens Add Nearby, a list of your friends will appear on the screen. Just tap to add.”

To be more recognizable to friends, users can also now add a selfie to the center of their Snapcodes. If uses see a Snapcode in another app, they can just take a screenshot and add the screenshotted Snapcodes through Add Friends.

Social media experts applauded the move, on Wednesday.

“The CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, is doing something that everyone in business should learn to do: Be unromantic about how you make your money,” said VaynerMedia co-founder and CEO Gary Vaynerchuk. “He took a feature that was very specific and unique to Snapchat, and sacrificed it for what is best for the user.”

Among other improvements, Snapchat recently rolled out two-factor authentication to improve Snapchat security. Once users enable it, “bad guys” will have a much harder time if they try to hack into your account, it promises.

Last month, Snapchat announced that it had raised an additional $537 million in new funding, which valued the company at $16 billion, prompting renewed scrutiny of its business model and potential profitability. The company claims to have 100 million users who watch 2 billion videos per day, suggesting it could be a serious rival to YouTube and Facebook.

Earlier this year, Snapchat launched Discover, which gives media partners their own channel to feature content produced specifically for Snapchat’s audience. Publishing partners include National Geographic, Vice, Yahoo News, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, CNN, The Food Network and ESPN.

At last count, Snapchat had 100 million users watching an astonishing 2 billion videos per day, according to internal figures. That’s half the volume of videos viewed on Facebook, although the latter is far larger in size.