3) The focus is on people
As soon as you connect Shortwave to your Google account, you’ll notice a list of people appearing down the left-hand side—these are the contacts that you’re in touch with most regularly in Gmail, and you can see at a glance who you’ve been chatting with and which of these people you currently have unread messages from (those names will appear in bold).
This person-centric approach makes more of a difference than you might think, encouraging you to view your email account more like an instant messaging service. Instead of seeing a daunting mass of emails, you see a list of actual people that you’re having conversations with, and you can quickly jump to the most important threads.
