I think we should go the opposite way. I think we should push more onto email. email is pretty ubiquitous. Nearly everyone online has email. It's as close to universal as anything else for accessing people. Instead of having a dozen different chat apps, push chats to email. Instead of a half dozen Slack wannabe apps, push all that to email. We should expand the email protocol to support that.
While we are at it, let's put everything you could possibly need into the browser...
Sure, a little snarky but I'm getting my point across. We have different tools because different situations require different tools. IM exists because it is used differently than email, and email is not well suited to real time back and forth short messages. Atom and RSS feeds exist because honestly someone doesn't need to know your email address for you to take an interest in what they publish.
