Jolicloud is a service that has taken some time to find its way. In Silicon Valley speak, you might know those maneuvers as “pivots”, but it seems like Jolicloud has finally found a sweet spot for its cloud services.
In what started out as an OS that let you download “apps” that accessed content in the cloud, the company has now placed its crosshairs directly on the personal cloud space. What’s the personal cloud, you ask? It’s more than documents and files, it’s photos and videos that we have scattered all over the Internet.
We spoke with Jolicloud’s founder Tariq Krim last month, and he discussed the latest surge towards bringing all of your media together into one place, your personal cloud.
This new personal cloud is called Jolicloud Me, and until today was only available on the web. The company has launched an iOS app that will let you check out and search for all of the content that share on sites like Facebook and Instagram.
One app to find all of your stuff
The idea of having a personal cloud is the exact premise Apple is pushing to consumers with its iCloud product, which now has 125M users. The idea is that no matter what computer, or device, you’re on, you should be able to access all of the most important data that you own. The fact that Apple is making a huge bet on the personal cloud, Jolicloud definitely has its work cut out for it.
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The difference between something like iCloud and Jolicloud is that to pull together all of your most important media, you don’t have to have the files on your computer or device to get started. The service will go back through all of the accounts that you sign up with and make it a part of your personal cloud. Apple’s iCloud requires your device to be the source of the content, with no importing tools for other social networks.
You can sign up for the service using your Facebook account, if you haven’t signed up already. As soon as you do that, your cloud will start being filled with photos, music, links, and videos that you’ve posted on Facebook. You can add more services as well, such as Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, Tumblr, and Twitter:
Once all of your items are indexed, you’ll be able to access them via your main Jolicloud “library”. The library lets you simply flick your way through all of your content, across all of the networks that you’ve attached to your account.
All of the items are timestamped, and I have to say that the search is pretty speedy. Within a matter of seconds, I was able to look at a stream of photos I took over a period of a few years. This is pretty difficult to do, if not impossible, with other personal cloud services.
The app is simple to navigate and beautifully designed and if this is Jolicloud’s last surge for greatness, it’s a pretty impressive “pivot”. I’ve found that one of my favorite features is the “collections” that you can make by mixing and matching content from all of your connected networks. You can create a collection called “pets” with links from Twitter, videos from Facebook, and photos from Instagram. It’s pretty neat.
This is the type of product that informs consumers on how powerful storing your information on servers in the “cloud” is. I imagine that storage devices will continue to get smaller over time, especially in laptops, and people will be pulling content from another source via the web. Of course, all of this will be completely seamless for the end user.
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