Gibber Redux

Back in April, I wrote about the Google Operating System meme that was doing the rounds, and I invented Gibber, which I described thusly:

an Orkut integrated IM client (desktop and mobile) which records your conversations so you can search them later on.

I’ve been thinking about IM clients a fair amount recently, as I’m starting to use it more and more, and of course one of the things I’ve discovered is that it really is a major pain to have people distributed across a whole series of non-interoperable systems. I’ve also been running the Google Deskbar since it was released last year. Deskbar is an obvious prelude to how Google’s desktop search technology (codenamed Puffin) might work.

So here’s what I’m thinking: what if Google combined Deskbar and Puffin with an IM client? And what if, instead of having Orkut, the social networking was built into this client (with complete FOAF integration of course)? What if you could search IM conversations as easily and as well as you can search email (across the conversation and across the metadata)?

And what if Google took every GMail account and turned it into a Jabber user ID as well?

That would turn a few heads, I think.