Not sure about the rest of you, but i'm exactly in the opposite team. email is as close to "universal messaging" as we'll ever get. It's the best example of interop we've seen so far and i'm afraid no new protocol could ever catch up with the almost 4 decades of email legacy.

Personally i don't care that Google won't let me talk to people. I treat google's email server like i treat a bourgeois café in a fancy district: there may be friendly people to have a chat with in there, but they definitely don't want me around and i have better places to be and better people to meet. Only a revolution can change this balance, and in the meantime i won't loose my energy trying to get into their club, but rather develop our decentralized clubs.