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The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article entitled “Why Email No Longer Rules”. The article reports on the decline of e-mail as a communication medium as a result of the steady upsurge in popularity of social networking sites such at Twitter and Facebook.

The constant stream of information that floods Facebook and Twitter highlights an inherent problem with the Wall Street Journal’s argument. These sites take a shotgun spray at information, while e-mailing is like a sniper’s bullet.

Facebook and Twitter have direct message options, but realistically, nothing will usurp e-mail’s throne as the primary means of internet communication and correspondence. And with smart phones in more and more peoples' pockets, e-mail notifications are only a touch away.

However, there are utilities in development hoping to expand on and enhance the effectiveness of e-mail by merging it with other communication mediums. Google Wave is a service in development by Google that will merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and social networking. Woah.

If successful, the Wave service will be revolutionary in its size and scope, incorporating nearly all of its services into one free service sustained by the real-time collaborative efforts of its members.

Google Wave has only been released to developers and a select few users to experiment with and develop for the platform. Beyond merging the functionality of the collaboration provided by Google Docs and the instant messaging services of GChat (or gmail chat), developers have hinted that add-ons are in the works to provide instant spelling/grammar check and automatic corrections, as well as automatic translation between over 40 languages.

Once the Wave washes ashore of the internet, the next generation of internet communication will have arrived.