It's amazing (disheartening?) to see Twitter evolve from the website where you could tell your friends that you were eating dinner, to a website where the President of the USA makes real policy announcements.
I wrote to own code to scrape my friend’s aim status, look for changes, slap them in a DB and then build a timeline web page out of them with PHP. I had my own twitter/facebook in 2000.
In that case, it's a bit different. Snapchat (and Instagram) stories are a gallery of photos and videos that you upload, where the photos and videos are removed from the gallery after 24 hours. Essentially giving you a rolling 24 hour window into peoples lives.
I've become a big fan of instagram stories as a way of keeping up with what my friends are doing, since I've moved overseas. It feels a lot more appropriate than using something like a Facebook status to share what you're doing.