Gmail Chat: Might Be Cool, But Maybe Not

So I had a chance to look closely at the screenshot that Google has nicely put into everyone’s Gmail accounts (click on the “Chats” option in the right margin). What does it look like (click to pop new window):

It seems that they have added the ‘quick contacts’ box — the people you email most regularly. Can be customized.

They have integrated text chat over the lower right hand corner. That is cool. But it looks like us Mac types are out of luck for integration with voice — needs Windows to run Gtalk (grrrr.) That’s sucks. Maybe won’t matter when they integrate with AIM, since AOL at least has a Mac client.

But the real shortfall, in my thinking, is not providing a user-centric perspective in the organization of communications. This is forcing us, as usual, into an artifact-oriented view. We will have various ‘boxes’ of communication along the upper left: inbox, sent mail, chats, etc.

Ok, but I would like the person-oriented pivot of that organization: An aggregation of all communications where the primary key is the individual. Instead of boxes I would like to have groups (based on tags, which are called labels in Gmail). These groups would show in the upper left, and if I clicked on ‘inner circle’ for example, I would see a list of people, and associated with each person, a chronological list of chats and email associated with them.

This is the Nerdvana vision: people — not artifacts — are the center of the universe. Maybe someday.