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When Kiko decided to close doors and auction the service on eBay, Paul Graham wrote a run up of affairs to explain what went wrong and how the little startup died. According to Paul Graham:

The killer, unforseen by the Kikos and by us, was Google Calendar’s integration with Gmail. The Kikos can’t very well write their own Gmail to compete.

It seems that Google is up at it again. Martin Porcheron, who translates Google applications to his native language “l33t” in his spare time has hinted at some upcoming Gmail features, and two of the three upcoming features are integration related.

Slideshow Integration:
It seems that Google is working on integrating the upcoming Google Presentation application with Gmail. Google recently acquired Tonic Systems to get access to a Power Point application. The application is not launched yet and is probably going through integration chores with other Google services. Google has already integrated Google docs and spreadsheets with Gmail and if someone sends you a word or excel document as an email attachment you can open it directly with Google docs & spreadsheets without launching the MS word application.

Multi-user conversations & AIM Integration:
Google might be adding a multi-user chat feature in Google Talk, something that Yahoo and MSN messengers already have for a long time now. Another upcoming feature for Google Talk is its integration with AIM, something that was promised when Google struck a $1 billion deal with AOL. Microsoft and Yahoo have previously integrated their Instant Messengers and with this move from Google two distinct islands of Instant Messengers will emerge.

On a related note Joost, a service in closed beta till now, has also integrated Google Talk to allow its users to share their views about a particular TV program with friends in real time (See snapshot below). Joost is backed by the founders of Kazaa and Skype, both of which were desktop applications like Joost. If the performance of Niklas and Janus in successfully building and launching desktop based applications is any indicator we can safely predict that Joost will also be able to gain mass user uptake. This in turn will cement Google Talk’s position against other IM apps.

We wrote about Joost, a few days back when they signed an advertisement deal with 31 major brands.