I have a long-running discussion with a number of friends:  what’s next for email?

After all, email hasn’t changed much in the past few decades.  Email readers have gotten slightly better over the years, with improved multimedia handling, searching, threading, calendar integration, etc.  In a lot of ways, email clients have been just good enough (e.g. Outlook) there haven’t been huge incentive for breakthroughs.

Also, instant messaging has overlapped with email.  How many times have you had a quick email exchange, then opened IM/chat to finish the discussion?  Some exchanges are interactive, and don’t lend themselves to an email message format.

I’m not sure if Google Wave will “catch”, but it’s the first thing I’ve seen in a long time that could be the evolution of email.