+1, I agree strongly that the "channel" is a powerful UX metaphor and enables better high-throughput communications, and that other modern ideas are expressed in chat applications in a way that's more comfortable to us than they are within email.

I also believe that there's a big gap between traditional text chat and an audio/video meeting, where casual discussion and emotion trade off against calendar space and long periods of captured focus -- so I hope we have progress to make here!

(I posted in a different thread in this submission that I believe in this so strongly that I'm making a product to try to bridge that gap, but I won't muddy things by re-linking it repeatedly.)