Nothing subtractive needs to happen here really. It’s all additive. The inbox interface would remain. We’d just be exposing private messages in one more feed, namely the Latest feed.
And rather than thinking of them as private messages, they are now private topics.
That way when you’re looking at a person’s profile and considering whether to:
- Open a private chat, or;
- Open a private message
(
if you’re seeing these options for the first time, how can you possibly know the difference between the two?)
..the options can instead be:
- Open a private chat
- Open a private topic
So what we’re talking about here could at its very simplest just be a name change, but I think the name would be much more intuitively understandable if it co-existed along with all other topics in the “All Topics” feeds.