So okay, you guys remember Scribd? They got a positive Uncov review a while ago. It's an online document viewer that supports a bunch of different formats so you don't have to download Adobe's thirty-two point fucking seven gigabyte Acrobat Reader to read your erotica stories.

It's a reasonable idea in practice, but like everything in Web 2.0, it gets taken too far and Michael Arrington goes apeshit over it.

If Attaching Documents Is Really That Hard For You ... →

Zoho Viewer is a Scribd ripoff that is centered around sending documents privately. The idea is that you upload your Word/PDF/whateverthefuck to Zoho, it gives you a URL for that document in its viewer, and you e-mail this URL to someone. Michael Arrington has declared that e-mail attachments are now a thing of the past. I have declared that Michael Arrington is terminally retarded.

The waves of stupid being emitted from TechCrunch this morning hit the resonant frequency of glass and shattered a decorative vase that my wife keeps in the living room.

I'll Just E-Mail It To Myself

PDF solved the problem of document format ubiquity. In 1993. It is an open standard, and is supposedly being proposed as an ISO standard. No document format you can come up with will ever compete with PDF.

Sooner or later, you gotta face facts. People can send & receive PDF documents. Most people can even send & receive MS Word documents. In no uncertain terms, Zoho Reader was useless before its conception.

As with all online document services, don't even think of using it if confidentiality is important to you. That rules out, uh, pretty much all of the business community. If you can't sell it to business, you need to sell it to consumers. If consumers don't buy it, you have to give it to them for free and sell it to advertisers. If you can't sell it to advertisers, well, then you have failed it. Your skill is not enough.