Rivals Google and Microsoft have premiered ‘game changing’ products within hours of each other as they fight for supremacy in online innovation.

Google is uniting instant messaging, e-mail and document collaboration into a new service with the audacious goal of changing how people communicate online.

The service, called Wave, will erode the distinction between the various ways people keep in touch on the Web and eliminate the need to use multiple tools to do so, the company said.

Microsoft had unveiled Bing, its much-anticipated successor to Windows Live Search, just hours earlier.

Google previewed Wave at its annual developers conference in San Francisco. The free service won’t be available to the public until sometime later this year. Additionally, Google intends to incorporate some of Wave’s features into its other services like e-mail and documents.

With Wave, multiple users will be able to exchange real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space known as a ‘wave’.

Everyone invited to the wave will be able to insert a reply or edit the wave directly, see instantly what fellow collaborators are typing and even publish a wave to a blog or website, where the content will update instantly as the wave changes.

The aim is to allow people to communicate and work together in a richer, more instant and integrated way.

“Two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s. Since then, so many different forms of communication have been invented – blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc – and computers and networks have dramatically improved,” said Lars Rasmussen, software engineering manager.

“With Google Wave, we’re proposing a new communications model that presumes all these advances as a starting point. After more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager – and a little nervous – to return and see what the world might think.”

It comes just hours after Microsoft unveiled its latest weapon in the fight to take on Google, a search engine called Bing. Formerly code-named Kumo, Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine effort designed to replace Windows Live Search and aims to change how people search.

Bing focuses on delivering answers, not webpages, and aims to help consumers make decisions rather than catalogue content. It is being launched with a mammoth $80-$100 advertising push. [via Utalk]

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