Yes... Why can't people just download Trillian and stop giving Snapchat and Whatsapp billions of dollars. le sigh

SnapChat makes sense because it's got the whole deletion-driven ephemral images model. That doesn't really require its own protocol, though.

Now I'm fantasizing about some kind of extensible system that allows that kind of special messaging. Making a cross-platform system for that would be hard. HTML5+JS message bodies (omg security!)? Plugin architecture? Idunno.

TIL what XMPP stands for. Neat! I thought Google said they dropped it because they had trouble extending it to do the things they wanted with Hangouts... when the whole point of the protocol was extensibility? That's unfortunate.

Because that kind of always-on chat will destroy your battery.

Well, Trillian can't do what Snapchat does, and no user is giving it any money, so this seems pretty irrelevant.

RIP MSN. When I was a teenager I used to spend all day in a group chat with some friends. I think the feature I miss the most is the custom emoticons.

I've since moved onto Skype's group chat, but nothing I've comes close to MSN. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic.

It's funny, I have a WP7 phone and the lack an MS-blessed messaging system sticks out. You use Facebook account if you want to send messages through the Internet instead of SMS using the built-in features of the OS.

They bought Skype after the OS was created and never gave it the kind of deep bindings into the OS that other popular social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) got.

Has everyone forgotten about IRC? A cross platform IRC app would be sweet.