I'm sure it's a well-polished product, and that it'll be popular with teenage girls, but "popular with teenage girls" isn't usually google's goal, is it?
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-who-you-want-on-we...
Avatar based chats are probably better than existing text-in-a-window ones for multi-person conversations because of the ease with which we can localize and assign voices to faces. I'd consider this the first significant step (by Google) in doing away with physical co-location of office workers.
You mean starting with themselves? Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices, partly through culture and partly through the need for hush hush security.
> Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices
This is just not true.
Of course its nice to have good offices to go to when you so choose. Its just I know that when I go to an office I normally get nothing done (its almost too social).