Google are definitely the Yin to Microsoft’s Yang and it is no better illustrated when comparing their attitudes towards email. Amidst the hype about Google Wave http://wave.google.com Google have shown that they are undoubtedly in support of Email 2.0 with a new feature which I can only surmise at this point is made available to special partners. It has been dubbed as enhanced content for email, but I like the phrase “Augmented Email” best.

Essentially when you get an email through from a company who is part of this Google program in your Gmail email client, Google will stream this enhanced content to areas above or below the email message. This could be a simple piece of HTML, but more likely nicely formatted galleries of products and offers from an RSS feed or such like. Here is a netfilx example, with a few user cases:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/10/gmail-messages-with-enhanced-content.html

Taking this a step further, a simple XML tag placed in an email, that won’t be rendered by any other mail client, but would be recognised by Gmail could display this sort of content in the body of the email. There are of course concerns over security, however, done correctly this could be a powerful step towards Email 2.0 – Meanwhile, Microsoft appear to be stepping backwards to Email 0.2, and we can safely assume that Office 2010 and their MS Word rendered HTML will have nothing like this sort of capability.

It does open the doors to a third party plug-in for Outlook though, which could do the same thing by identifying the from address and displaying a feed of content from that sender. Surely its only a matter of time before some very clever developers make a start on this sort of thing…