Now here’s some exciting speculation – a Google connection for .Mac? Yeah, it’s an obvious thing for them to do, but wouldn’t it be great? I keep having to increase my storage space on .Mac, and I look enviously at the acres of free storage on Googlemail (yes, I could forward my .Mac mail to Googlemail, but I haven’t go that desparate – yet).
But even more exciting, for me, are the possibilities this offers in terms of further GoogleTalk/iChat integration. Yes, I can already chat to people using GoogleTalk and iChat – which is great with Googlemail users who don’t even know they have GoogleTalk (using the in-browser client). And I can video chat to other iChat users connected via GoogleTalk jabber. But I can’t video chat cross platform, yet (iChat lacks jingle. And I can’t access some cool GoogleTalk features, like voicemail.
My wish list for the Leopard version of iChat: dump AIM and switch to full GoogleTalk integration, GoogleTalk (and by extension iChat) to support SIP calls to the POTS network, visual voicemail in iChat and full cross platform audio and video chats.
Oh yeah, and if all that were integrated into the iPhone, too, I might even think about getting one.