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.