So, I'm sitting in Dragon chat and notice that someone said something, so I start to reply... to text thats half an hour old.
Timestamps would be nice, but there's not a lot of space down in that chat window, and I really don't care if someone said something 28 minutes 14 seconds ago -- "a long time ago" would suffice.
How about blending the text color towards the background color as it gets older? This doesn't have to be updated every millisecond (or second) and doesn't need to be a continuous change. Say, 100% opacity for 0-5 mins old, 90% opacity for 5-15 mins, and 70% opacity for 15 mins and older.
Am I the only one who thinks this would be useful?