The newest things to come out of the Google Labs is Google Wave, which may very well be the future of email. I don't know much about it, and it's only just being released for developer feedback (it's not even in beta yet), but C|Net has some nifty screenshots and a little writeup of what it could mean to the future of communication.
The upshot is a convergence of email, IM, social networking, blogs, and all those other goodies that we all check on a daily basis. It's also created by the brothers Rasmussen, the geniuses behind Google Maps, so it should be quite good once it's fleshed out and assuming that it gets developer buy-in.
Keep an eye out.
I thought you might like Wave...looks pretty cool. thoghh you and I both know how scope creep and marketing schedules conspire to make mincemeat out of product releases.
Yeah, no kidding. I hope that it doesn't happen in this case. This looks to do for email and social networking what Trillian and Pidgin have done for instant messaging.