I had a vision a while back of a desktop app that merged IM and email into one construct. Everything would cue up like email but you could interact with / pay attention to a thread in real time.
One reason I stopped thinking about it was that was the Gmail + GTalk promise. It hasn’t materialized in my opinion.
If the Outlook, Thunderbird, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail folks could all sit down together in a room for a week and act like adults, they could hash this out. They could give us something that works and is interoperable. And while they’re doing that, they could figure out the spam problem.
Instead we wallow in this crappy transition / evolution time in communication because the BigCo’s rely on old standards (SMTP) or proprietary protocols (IM). The latter is getting better but we could use a more sweeping solution.