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Attachments are Evil – Link, don’t Send

Well.. not fully .. just yet. But I’ve argued it would be so in a recent post: Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle.

Forget attachments, the version control nightmare, software incompatibility issues, storage requirements: share documents by URL. That’s what the newly released Zoho Viewer enables you to do with your Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files as well as PDF, RTF, ODF and OpenOffice documents. It’s private, not indexed by Google or other search engines, so you don’t have to worry about leaking confidential data, yet you can easily share documents, right from the Viewer interface, or by using the URL it generates. Essentially it’s a TinyURL, SnipURL ..etc for documents, with additional options, like embedding the URL, tracking the number of views, or even editing your uploaded doc’s with the relevant Zoho programs.

While it’s really simple to use, here’s an intro video :

Attachments are Evil… smile_angry

Related posts: Lifehacker, Wired, TechCrunch, Digital Inspiration, Zoho Blogs.

Update: (2/13/08):  ReadWriteWeb introduces PDFMeNot, a similar service for PDF’s only.