Geek Chic – Smart Design for the Style Conscious

So I’m planning this big event. And it means there are a lot of documents flying back and forth between me and the other event planners. Word Docs, Excel Spreadsheets. Jpeg’s, PDF’s and above all emails.
Let me preface the following with a simple and direct thought.

I hate opening attachments.
I hate downloading attachments.
I hate how people use attachments and most of the time don’t know how to resize or compress anything so you end up getting a ginormous 12 mb email stuffed full of crap that you didn’t want or need to see anyway.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if that stuff didn’t bulk up your inbox?
Wouldn’t it be great if an entire project could be housed at one location so anyone who needs to can find anything related to that project anytime can do so with no special software, just the browser?

Google Wave
Well it looks like Google is in the hunt for just such a product with their brand spanking new Google Wave product, however we plebs out here won’t get to see inside that crystal palace till the end of the year so instead, we still gotta make do with what’s out there now.

UPDATE : 10/21/2009

I just scored a beta invite to Google Wave. Very excited to try it out.

UPDATE: 10/28/2009

Google Wave is incredibly powerful. Stacks of how to’s out there and I’m honestly just too busy to sit and sing it’s praises for 20 pages when so many greats have already gone before. I will say this, there is one major downfall with Google Wave that can only be corrected by time.

It’s a completely closed system, you can only use Google Wave with other Google Wave members and there ain’t nobody in there with you. I knew 2 people who were beta members and though it was fun to play around with a collaborative story time experiment. It really won’t flex it’s muscles till it is touting the user base of a gmail or facebook. More to come.

UPDATE: 12/01/2009

Google just announced they have opened the beta of Google Wave to 1 million members. Plus I just got a couple of invites in my Google Wave box to play around with. Hmmm who shall I invite?

Now we are really going to begin to see the dawn of online collaborative tools. Google Wave is massively extensible so really, the sky is the limit. Only thing stopping us now is that pesky learning curve.