Hotmail Wave 4 adds several features that have until now been unique to Google’s Gmail, and in some cases pushes them further. Threaded conversations, an advanced search box for email, and massive cloud-based data storage for email and attachments seem deliberately designed to compete with Google’s leading features. Moreover, the user interface has few buttons or images. It relies mostly on clickable text links for controls. Very Google.

But Hotmail Wave 4 adds Bing-like inline viewing of multimedia links — Flickr, Hulu, YouTube, etc — in messages. It’s the most compelling reason yet to install Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, a competitor to Adobe Flash and the HTML5 open standard. If someone sends you a bunch of photo attachments, Hotmail automatically serves them as a photo album.

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