This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?
You could always keep them separate, if you wanted to. This feature was totally invisible to people who left it turned off.
I personally want to have all my messaging in one place, which used to be possible. Now everything is fragmented, and I constantly have to remember how each person in my life prefers to communicate, open the right app, find their name, and then message them. It's incredibly frustrating to have a worse 2017 messaging experience than I did in 2007 with my BlackBerry.
> This might be a naive question, but will chat within Gmail still work? Is that chat provided by Talk or Hangouts?
Chat in Gmail is Hangouts.
I think this is true to an extent, but I think messaging isn't as simple "get this text to this person." Different communications channels have different contexts, implied importance, etc. Making them too unified papers over and confuses those social differences. For instance, it would be super weird if a coworker texted me instead of IM'd me about some everyday work thing.
I also want priority of messages to let the receiver handle them differently (low/normal/high). Default ‘normal’ and changeable within reach, but quite invisible. Anyone can then let me write a ‘high’ priority message that makes noise in the middle of the night, or if I suspect they're resting and I want to send a cat picture I'll use ‘low’.