Having a pop-up chat and a 'messages' icon directly here on the steemit main page would be ideal.
I really find Facebook messenger very user-friendly, and I mainly log onto facebook to keep up with chats..So if we could direct message, group message, video call etc directly here, that would be a boost that ups the 'social' part of Steemit :)
That comes up a lot here for sure, great comments today.