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A few hours after getting AIM integrated with my Gmail chat, I posted to Twitter: “hmm this is pretty cool, I may never open Trillian again.” I spend all day inside of Gmail as is – bringing my buddy list inside of it makes sense, and makes my system run marginally faster since I don’t need to keep an additional desktop application open. Additionally, assuming my buddies don’t go “off the record,” it makes all of my IMs searchable.
Imagine being able to instantly make a VoIP call directly to anyone on your buddy list, anywhere in the world, from inside the software program where you already maintain your entire address book. Then, imagine being able to search the audio of these conversations, in addition to the existing ability to search all of your emails, IMs, and SMS messages (another feature of Jangl). This would all be possible if Google made these two deals, and of course, tightly integrated them with Gmail.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Now, let’s assume you can make calls from within the Gmail interface. That’s where Pluggd comes in. Currently, Pluggd offers some pretty slick tools for searching audio, but it’s primarily focused on media content, such as the audio search player they launched for CNET. However, it’s not a big leap to apply that same technology to recorded VoIP conversations, which could also be a more lucrative advertising model. Imagine searching for a conversation you had with a colleague about which CRM software vendor you were going to select. As part of Gmail, such a search would produce high paying ads for Salesforce, SAP, etc.
In addition to these completely 100% speculative deals, there are also the one’s that Google has already done that might make some sense integrated into Gmail. There’s GrandCentral, which rings all of your phones simultaneously – that would be a great feature to have connected to your buddy list. Then, there are Jaiku and Zingku, which could bring geo-presence data and microblogging into the mix.
Google could of course build any of these features themselves, but Jangl (and competitor/partner Jajah) and Pluggd have both done a great job with their respective pieces of the puzzle. Given how simple yet powerful the AIM integration is within Gmail, I imagine Jangl and Pluggd could be added without adding any unnecessary clutter to Google’s squeaky clean interface.
Pretty killer, in this blogger’s humble opinion.