The problem is that you are trying to corral a massive set of different technologies and platforms into a unified 'god UI'.
This already exists to a large extent on my iPhone as far as sending outbound messages. I don't know about you, but when I want to email/call/sms/mms/videochat etc say, my father, I don't goto those apps. I just hit the 'home' button on my phone to bring up unified search, type 'dad' and get his contact page allowing me to instantly choose any one of those options to message him. Email, short message, video, phone call, -it's all right there.
If you wanted to take it to the next level, you'd want to be able to open up the API so you could toss in Fb, Twitter, or whatever other services you want on that page to choose from.
The unified UI is basically there already though.
It gets harder when we talk about incoming messages though, because we've got different senders pushing different types of messages to us on a vast array of different platforms and technologies. But isn't this what 'notification centers' are? A single point that unifies and corrals your collection of different incoming messages? And now Apple is merging their iOS notifications with OSX, syncing through the cloud. I agree it's not pretty yet, but we are getting closer, -like I said, I strictly use a unified message UI for sending outbound messages for most of my day.
I think this merging of central messaging UIs that are synced across operating systems will become more refined (so much room for improvement), but will definitely get there. But at the end of the day we're still funneling data from a wide range of different apps in order to present it as best we can keeping both form and function in mind.
This already exists to a large extent on my iPhone as far as sending outbound messages. I don't know about you, but when I want to email/call/sms/mms/videochat etc say, my father, I don't goto those apps. I just hit the 'home' button on my phone to bring up unified search, type 'dad' and get his contact page allowing me to instantly choose any one of those options to message him. Email, short message, video, phone call, -it's all right there.
If you wanted to take it to the next level, you'd want to be able to open up the API so you could toss in Fb, Twitter, or whatever other services you want on that page to choose from.
The unified UI is basically there already though.
It gets harder when we talk about incoming messages though, because we've got different senders pushing different types of messages to us on a vast array of different platforms and technologies. But isn't this what 'notification centers' are? A single point that unifies and corrals your collection of different incoming messages? And now Apple is merging their iOS notifications with OSX, syncing through the cloud. I agree it's not pretty yet, but we are getting closer, -like I said, I strictly use a unified message UI for sending outbound messages for most of my day.
I think this merging of central messaging UIs that are synced across operating systems will become more refined (so much room for improvement), but will definitely get there. But at the end of the day we're still funneling data from a wide range of different apps in order to present it as best we can keeping both form and function in mind.