It's more immediate than a text, less intrusive than a call. With a snapchat, you're more likely to open it and respond quickly than a text message, because just like the time limit on images, once the time has passed, the moment is gone. It keeps you hooked in.
Sometimes I worry about a dystopian future of tech where each startup is making small incremental improvements on various minor aspects of life ("It's slightly easier than sending a text!") only to be disrupted by a newcomer with another small improvement on it ("It's even more slightly easier to send than a text than the last startup!").
The big breakthroughs never happen. We just continue to iterate and A/B test ourselves into a convenient oblivion.
It's worth remembering that on a human scale, the Internet is still in its infancy. It took a looooooong period of industrialization before we had anything close to a mass railway system.
The Snapchats of today are just looking to do things differently enough to make some coin before the real next big thing arrived. It's like how much customization for AIM and other desktop messenger accounts existed before smartphones, but then after smartphones became ubiquitous, there is no "profile" or anything that takes up real estate. Just your name and your messages.
Going back to industrialization, just look at bikes. There were zillions of kinds of bikes in that era but nowadays we only really know 2: on-road and off-road. So even if things seem crazy now, it will only be crazy in retrospect as we live through a more technologically reasonable future.
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