I think Personal messages & private chats should eventually be integrated. While it is useful to have the ability to asynchronously communicate is very well appreciated, I personally believe that personal messages and 1 to 1 chats are just redundant. I see the eventual resulting product having three forms of conversation:
- Topics: For everyone participating and for everyone else who just wants to browse (non-logged in users)
- Group Chats: informal conversations (especially off-topic) go here, anything that is important or needs to be made public can be exported into a topic.
- Person to Person conversations: as of now, there are two ways: either send a message or through chat. what I see is these two to be integrated as one and be made into one robust system of person to person interactions.