3. Spotify. The reason for the decline, if not yet outright collapse, of the global recording industry is that it is has not been meaningful or desirable for consumers to own music. The industry's principal delivery system for music, even to this date, remains a container that consumers no longer want; and the system that consumers prefer, and which a majority of them now actually use, is something that the industry has yet to truly embrace. Services like Last.fm and Pandora are more convenient than music ownership and, for more users today, more interesting than radio.

Spotify gambles with the notion that $9.99/month subscriptions to its premium mobile services (estimated last month at about 2.5 million) will be enough to pay down the royalties it undoubtedly owes for all its users, including those who use the free Spotify Radio desktop app to choose the music they want from Spotify's huge library. RWW's John Paul Titlow has been covering Spotify and Spotify Radio very thoroughly, in part 1 and part 2; and RWW's Jon Mitchell named Spotify #6 in his list of overall Top 10 Consumer Web Apps for 2011.

But what made Spotify qualify here again as a Top Cloud App is something it didn't have last year: an apps ecosystem of its very own. If you're thinking we've screwed up and posted a picture of Last.fm instead... well, it's no screw-up. Spotify's new desktop application, with music recommendation apps built-in, is so strong that it includes Last.fm as one of its recommendation providers, along with Rolling Stone magazine and TuneWiki.

When fully built out, the Spotify apps ecosystem will enable what the company is calling an "authentication layer" between record labels, app developers, and users. The technology that the record industry could not find it within itself to build for itself, may just end up being built for it. When that happens, it may have a certain deity to thank, followed immediately by Spotify.

2. iCloud. The establishment of Apple's stronghold in devices, and the services that support them, was deliberate, systematic, and in almost every aspect of its execution, brilliant. The exception was MobileMe, a service whose frequent slip-ups and uncharacteristically dramatic failures led Steve Jobs to openly declare its launch "not our finest hour."

Therefore iCloud could be noteworthy for having (at least thus far) not been a spectacular failure. But the brilliance of Apple's marketing has left many with the impression that iCloud has no direct competition with Android. What Android does lack, and what iCloud does provide, is a context of the service as an ever-present resource that's attached, albeit ethereally, to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Of course it's an Apple-only service, but haven't all Apple-produced disk drives since 1978 been Apple-only? From Apple's perspective, why must a virtual device, by definition, be more platform-agnostic than a physical one?

Because it's just another Apple device, it's programmable like an Apple device. Developers can build apps around it, and create new functions and methods that Apple Corp. hasn't even foreseen. For any other platform, this would be a great thing; from Apple's perspective, it could easily become perceived as an effort by independents to trim their way through Apple's carefully walled garden. Expect some "openness" issues to crop up around iCloud throughout 2012.

1. Evernote. Bill Gates was known to have overused the word "great" during his press appearances as the head of Microsoft, so there are probably thousands of sound bites of the phrase "great apps" just waiting to be compiled into the next great, annoying YouTube mash-up. Only a few apps get to be described as things of beauty.

At its core, Evernote does one thing, and does that very well. It collects clips of data from the Web sites you're reading or the applications you're using, and gathers them into categories that can be synced in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices. I noticed Evernote had pervaded the apps repertoires of many of the Syracuse University students we covered during last month's MLB.com Apps Challenge. Now that laptops, tablets, and in some universities, thin client desktops are the principal research tool of every scholar, Evernote has quickly risen to the level of ubiquitousness among this specific class of users - as invaluable to the work they do as Twitter.

Whether Evernote rises to the level of "beauty" depends on whether it raises its batting average of late. My friend and colleague Joe Brockmeier discovered the latest app in the Evernote ecosystem, called Hello, was perhaps a little less than half-baked. Nevertheless, the core of Evernote has joined Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs as the very definition of "cloud app" among users who know the cloud, and who truly do get it.