CloudApp: Terrible name, useful little app.

There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp.

A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".

Three possibilities crossed my mind:

1. Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
2. Twitter phishing scam
3. (remote possibility) an actual app.

Possibility #2 was confirmed in my mind when I saw the following tweet:



At the time, the link lead you to the "beta signup" page which asked for your Twitter credentials. My immediate reaction: "Wow, scam it is."

I followed @getcloudapp out of curiosity (if it was a social study, I wanted to see the results.) Later in the day, we were told that if you were one of the first 1000 followers, you were automatically signed up for the beta. A month later, I got my beta invite via Twitter DM. I bit, signed up, and was pleasantly surprised. It was indeed an actual app, and a relatively useful one at that.

Cloud.app is an application that blurs the line between the Mac OS X desktop and the cloud (or internet, if you will). While I still think CloudApp is a terrible name, the application gives you a menubar icon (a neat little cloud) to which you can drag a file, files, or folder from your finder, or a few other supported apps. (You can also set a hotkey for this action.) Those files are automatically uploaded to Cloud.app's servers, zipped, assigned a unique URL at the cld.ly domain. The URL is then copied to your clipboard for pasting at your discretion. This also works with URLs (or the currently open Web page, via hotkey) and acts as an URL shortener service. All in all, a simple, unobtrusive, and quite useful little app.

As it is in beta, there is a support forum with issues being reported fairly regularly. I'd assume amongst those issues lie some security holes, so I'd be careful WHAT you share, but this thing has potential. CloudApp also prohibits beta testers from sharing screenshots of the application, which is why we can only tease you with a cloud icon. But we'll have more information for you when we can.

The jury is still out on possibilities #1 and #2 though.

Tags: cloudapp, preview, url-shortener