I was thinking the same thing, it's so nice that we have an active game developer that is open to suggestions and is actually implementing changes. Awesome job David!
I'm hoping it's one of those "we take the initiative .. see the value .. jdb does it" kind of thing .. lol
Oh, I see the value and part of the recent interface update was to get some infrastructure that could more easily handle a chat system. Not sure how soon but it will be coming.
Until a more permanent solution can be found, Slack works well too, and is more secure than Google Hangouts. Not too difficult to make a new channel within the program.