Jill Walker and Elin Sjursen have been playing with a "streaming icons" enhancement for iChat AV and speculate on the idea of synchronizing chat comments with the images to create a kind of photographic comic book of the chat (a very loose paraphrase, but I think that's what they're getting at). I'm personally not a big chatter, so I don't have much to say about that idea as such. However, I am reminded of the "Comic Strip Mode" that is part of Microsoft's chat client (or was as of two years ago, which was the last time I looked at it). Comic Strip Mode not only gave you speech bubbles tied to an cartoonish avatar, but also a number of facial expressions, a choice of backgrounds, and some extras like thought bubbles. The software automatically chose whether to do close-up, medium, or long-distance "shots" of the conversation. We always used to show people this feature when we did workshops on computer-mediated communication. Students tended to think this was really cool for about 15 minutes, but when they actually wanted to get something done via chat, they almost always switched back to plain-text mode. What Jill and Elin are imagining would be different, because the "avatar" is a real image of the speaker at the moment of speaking, but I wonder if the images would still be seen as a distraction from the text.