Ever since my first child was born, almost a year ago, I have taken more pictures and video than I ever had before. We are posting a picture of our son crawling on Instagram, sharing him take his first steps on Facebook, and tweeting out to the world when he smiled at us for the first time.
With all of the social media sites that are out there that we can use to share our precious moments, we would have a handful of pictures on Instagram, some videos and more pictures on Facebook and Twitter, and others in albums in Picasa, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow combine all of these social media sites into one place so we could view ALL of our pics in one place? This is where an app like Jolicloud can really come in handy on your iPhone. Let me show you more about what I am talking about after the jump.
Setting Up Jolicloud
The beauty of Jolicloud is that it is able to pull your media and links from a variety of social media sites and browse through them all in one nice looking app. Setting it up is very easy to do and can be done in minutes.
Setting up your services with Jolicloud Me
There are six different social media sources that the app is currently connected with: Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, Tumblr, and Twitter. The only step you need to take in order to set it all up is to connect to your personal media sources. Each one will differ slightly as to what can be pulled from them into Jolicloud.
Browsing Your Feed
Once all the media is pulled from the different sources that you connected with, you can now do a few different things within the app. First, you can scroll through and see all the different things that got pulled in from your social media sources and you can also do a search for specific items.
Your Jolicloud Me feed and search function
As you are looking through your feed, both pictures and videos can be tapped on and then seen by itself as if the picture was taken on the iPhone. With links, you can click on them and you will be taken to that link, where you can then share it on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. It can also be opened in Safari or Readability if you want that option.
Looking at a picture (left) and link (right)
Collections
This is where the true power of Jolicloud comes into play. I have pictures from our trip to Hawaii just recently, but they are spread out through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and I want to put them all in one place so people can look at them. In this case, I can just create a collection and put all of the pics in there.
Adding to a collection (left) and browsing a collection (right)
All I have to do is click on the Add to Collection button and then my list of collections will show up and I just select the one I want it to go into. When you are done selecting all the media and links that you want to go into that collection you can now just open it up and see everything you put in there from all the different services.They can be set to both private and public so that you have the option to decide if you want to share it out with the world or only to a select few.
The only problem with this is that you cannot share out a link to others if you want them to see it. I am not sure if this is because they are still in beta or what, but right now the only way for people to see your collections is that they have to join Jolicloud. Hopefully, this changes in the future as this would really cripple the Collections feature.
Browsing a public collection
Speaking of others on Jolicloud, you can also follow other people who are using the service as well as Facebook friends that are on it. You also have the option of following a specific collection of someone as well. This feature is somewhat similar to Pinterest where you can see other people’s public boards. I don’t know if Jolicloud Me will head in this direction, but it would also be nice to see some interactive features where I can leave a comment or like someone’s stuff that I am following.
Final Thoughts
Personally, I think this app fills a need for those that use multiple social networks to share their media and links. It is a great way to have all of them come together in one nice and easy app to use. Jolicloud is currently in beta and when I checked out the website, you can see other icons for other services that were not on the iPhone app. It would be really cool to see it implement more services like Dropbox and Google Docs.
Possible services for Jolicloud Me
Overall, the app was well done and set up was a breeze. Even though Jolicloud is in beta, the iPhone app is available to everyone on the App Store for free. You first have to request an invite to use the service and you can do this at beta.jolicloud.com. If you use multiple social services and want to have them all conected into one nice app, then go and check out Jolicloud.