Meetsee is a virtual office that allows you to do office stuff with your remote workmates. You might even do some work while you are there.

Home based workers, downsizing companies and distributed workforces may be interested in this cutesy but useful solution.

There is no doubt that offices are out and home-based workers are in - will Meetsee breach the gap?

While developers, small teams and individuals may flock to Meetsee, will this solution just be too much too soon for the corporate world?

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Sit back and relax while I tell you a story. This story is set in the future - but not too far away. We’re going to take a walk through the central business district of your nearest city. As we walk, notice how quiet it is - a few cars drive past, but in this city notice how few people there are walking past. The signs out the front of all of the office buildings advertise bargain basement lease opportunities, but there are no buyers here.

Scared yet? Is this the post-apocolyptic remnants of the global financial crisis? Nope. People will still be working, they just won’t be doing it at Main Street.

There is little doubt that the future of the workplace will be that there will be no workplace at all. It’s already happening, infact. Thousands of customer service operators are answering customer phone calls not from call centres but from their home office while wearing their pyjamas. With increasing broadband speeds, telephony solutions and dazzling new technologies, the ‘at home’ worker is now realizable, efficient, and above all, cheap for the employer.

So the question needs to be asked: if this is such a cheap, easy and realistic way of staffing your company, why isn’t everybody doing it?

The answer is two-fold. Firstly and most simply, it takes a while for companies to catch on. The virtual workplace is very much early-adopter stuff at this moment in time. The other reason is more interesting. Work, of course, is not just work. The office is a key part of our social network and provides human contact on a daily basis. We chat to our neighbour. We have a giggle at a joke sent through by email. We meet with our manager and chat about the month. It seems that it is proving very difficult for many company’s HR departments to be convinced that virtual workers won’t turn into raving degenerates in two days flat without human contact.

And here’s where Meetsee comes into the story. Meetsee is your office on your computer screen. As one of the new virtu-workers of the world, you can interact with your globally distributed colleagues by chatting with them, stew over a whiteboard session, look at files together and then once the virtual work day is done, you can leave the virtual office and meet your virtual workmates at the virtual pub for a virtual beer.

I have to admit that my initial thoughts about Meetsee was that it was, frankly, ridiculous. We don’t have a solution for a workplace here - we have a computer game for tweens once they graduate from Zwinky and World of Warcraft. But even as I was planning my panning, I started to realize that this is a well executed replication of an office. You really can do much of what you actually need to do in an office using Meetsee. Want to leave a note for someone? No problems - head over to the corkboard. Need to actually talk with someone? Sure - walk over to them and start a chat, phone call or bring up a webcam of them. Want to share the new website wireframes that you’re designing? Head over to the filing cabinet and share files with your supervisor.

The Sims-like environment is not perfect, however. Load times were long, inviting other people to the office space was tedious and hopping between popup and web-browser grows old quickly. Personally I’m not a fan of the general design of the offices - the cartoony elements will not appeal to everybody (especially corporate HR departments!) and I would like to see a slicker design focus. It’s great that everything is customisable, but instead of drag and drop functionality, chairs, clocks and tables are rearranged using a clunky menu interface. Meetsee invites you to play around with your environment, but it’s not a particularly pleasurable experience to do so.

The real potential for integrating Meetsee and the workplace will be as the aforementioned tweens leave school and move into the workforce. Suddenly the idea of a virtual office is not so far-fetched: afterall, these people have been living in virtual worlds since they were knee-high to a grasshopper.

Meetsee’s business model is supported by user subscription, with plans starting at $16.99 a month for individuals and $69.95 for small teams. Enterprise plans are available on application. All plans are currently free while Meetsee is in beta release.

While the application itself is not perfect, it’s not the technology that will prevent users taking up Meetsee. This startup is bravely trying to change societal attitudes to the workplace  - which will come… but will it come while Meetsee still has investor funds in the bank?

You can visit Meetsee and sign up for an account here.

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