It&#x27;s interesting to hear everyone saying &#x27;ah, I&#x27;m too old for Snapchat&#x27;.  At face value I feel that way too, but I think there&#x27;s something more going on here.<p>Snapchat strikes me as a really unique modality.  It&#x27;s not really a message type that we can draw some kind of lineage back to PARC or Bell Labs or whatever.  Slack follows a familiar pattern of &#x27;oh yeah, that&#x27;s just like IRC and they had those running on Altos a million years ago&#x27;.  SMS, yeah that&#x27;s just chat.  And so on...<p>Was there a Snapchat equivalent back in the dark ages of networked computers?  Not that I&#x27;m familiar with (although I&#x27;d love to see an example). I think that fact points to a meaningful difference between the computer that&#x27;s in your hand or your pocket all the time and the &#x27;workstation&#x27; that&#x27;s on your desk.  A computer that&#x27;s always with you can deliver different kinds of messages and project different kinds of presence from other people you know.  I hope Snapchat is just the beginning of this.<p>Snapchat doesn&#x27;t have some kind of physical equivalency like a book or a note on the fridge.  I don&#x27;t think appreciating that is necessarily pegged to age, but more to openness.  Snapchat is just legitimately unfamiliar and unusual.  From afar, I think that&#x27;s great.