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Managers needing to make go or no-go decisions on such orders have the capability of viewing the entire purchase order from within the message or approving or rejecting it. The system is obviously extensible to shipping, invoicing, merchandise tracking and more.

Now, what's next?

How will these trends play out over the next few years? For one thing, we might need a new term for a program that not only handles incoming mail, but also connects broadly to data sources throughout the Internet.

Take a look at Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) to see a consumer-side aggregator for personal content. The free service lets you create a kind of Web log that is made up of any kind of media -- audio, video, photos, text -- that the user encounters on the Web.

That makes Tumblr a kind of blogging service, but note this: Tumblr also lets you aggregate data feeds from other sites you visit. Thus RSS streams from Web sites can flow into Tumblr, as can photos from community sites like Flickr, or bookmarks from del.icio.us.

The reality is that as we use the multifarious tools of Web 2.0, we set up an increasing number of information feeds, a multiplying online presence that can be confusing without somehow drawing it together.

So as Google, for example, eyes what Yahoo Mail and Zimbra are doing, it and other companies with major e-mail presences have to be thinking of adding hooks in their programs to resources that could be anywhere on the Web.

Web 2.0 is all about connections, something e-mail services have only recently begun to tap as users look for a common home for their data.

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