Seriously, I am glad these things are being discussed by the open social players and the aggregators of our information. Although I have already forsworn privacy, choices would be nice.

Keep on ‘em, Steve!

Well, only in the fact that it’s becoming clear that we have a multitude of data types flowing into our GMail/Gtalk interface.

It’s becoming a console for our web touch points, as you suggested in a podcast with the GMail product team.

And yes, as you say, we want to treat those touch points differently. Some we expect to be more private than others. Some we want to share.

While Gmail doesn’t yet recognize our micro-blogging friends (GMail plus opportunity?) as they stream in over XMPP, we may some day need a new category in addition to shared feeds, email contacts etc.

In fact, I’d say that as more of our information flows in over XMPP we are most definitely going to want the additional metadata about that info. Email is here. RSS is here. XMPP is coming on in a big way.

We know from recent syndication partnerships and API offerings from Twitter that we can embed ATOM into the XMPP, so the technology is there.

Next step. Let XMPP take its proper place along side these other communication protocols and utilize it to its full potential.

No pun intended, but these “tweets” are atomic, like an RSS item or an email. In fact, Gtalk already recognizes this within its own XMPP community.

Time to recognize the larger picture.