We missed our opportunity with chat about a decade or so ago. When all the disparate chat protocols (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) were battling it out, we should have decided on a protocol then. Sure, we'd see some growing pains now with how to deal with encryption, but at least we'd have a ubiquitous chat protocol. Chat is now worth billions of dollars apparently, so that proverbial cat is nowhere near the bag. I would love to be able to sign up with, say, Fastmail for chat and be able to chat with whomever I wish and it just work. As it is, I have be signed up with 4 different services and they don't talk to each other. Sigh.