For this year's ReadWriteWeb list of the most important and influential consumer-grade cloud computing apps of the year 2011, we focused our gaze on services that truly fit the formal definition: specifically, services that 1) utilize a remote resource of 2) variable capacity 3) which the user can provision for herself, 4) which is mostly or totally independent of programs installed on the user's devices or PCs, and 5) which is not just a Web site with a big server. You may have seen Facebook on some publications' Top Cloud lists already; by our definition, Facebook is not a cloud service. But we did look for providers that perform innovative, discrete functions built around their services.

Hosting services are not cloud apps for purposes of this list; and there are plenty of innovative hosts to consider (we gave serious thought to Wistia), but in the end we decided that a hosting service is not really an application unless it provides a discrete function that goes over and above simple storage or sharing. Analytics, which Wistia provides, is right on the edge, but it's really a measurement of a byproduct of using the service as opposed to a function that users actually perform. That's not saying Wistia isn't a great idea; it just belongs on another list.

10. CloudApp. The largest single category of cloud apps for consumers is storage and retrieval, which is understandable because it's a service that everyone needs to one degree or another. What's interesting is how certain services innovate on this theme, and especially whether they give themselves room to continue innovating.

CloudApp is for Mac OS and iOS users at the moment, and its innovation is that it's building a little ecosystem around itself. It utilizes your choice of quick-and-easy gestures for designating a file or object to send to CloudApp's storage, the most basic of which is dragging and dropping the object to CloudApp's icon in the taskbar. In exchange for this gesture, CloudApp produces a URI which is copied to the Clipboard. From there, you can paste it into an e-mail, a tweet, or an IM message; when your recipient receives the link, she has instant access to the object.

The way CloudApp innovates is by incrementally enhancing what can be easily uploaded, and how those objects can be utilized in their native context. One example is screenshots: You can designate a key for taking a screenshot and uploading it in one fell swoop; the recipient sees your link, clicks on it, and sees your screen. There's no exporting or importing necessary here.

But what hoisted CloudApp onto our Top 10 list this year is how well the company is promoting Raindrops. This is an extremely clever, self-promotional idea for enabling developers to build their own tools that utilize CloudApp in similarly contextual ways, with the help of CloudApp's own API. One example the company created at the time this feature was launched in April 2010 is for Adobe Photoshop; since then, the community has contributed a truckload more, including an intelligent link interpreter for Twitter and a stand-alone CloudApp client for iOS called Stratus.

Here's an example (above) of another add-on you can't even see (which is a good thing): The maker of SparrowMail used CloudApp's API to develop a way to do simple drag-and-drop of attachments into e-mail messages, bypassing Mac OS' sometimes convoluted series of steps.

Building a community around something as simple as an app is a difficult thing for a small company to achieve, especially when it's in competition with a plethora of other vendors in the same category. CloudApp is pulling this off brilliantly. (It's worth noting that the service is built on the open-source Heroku platform from Salesforce, thus answering RWW's question from last year on whether developers will trust Heroku: Yes.)

9. Waze. What would be nice is if someone hired a few thousand cars to drive around each town looking for traffic incidents, and report on them in real-time. Let's see, $25 bucks per hour salary times 1,000 reporters times 50 cities... I'll get back to you on that idea.

Or, what would be brilliant is if someone leveraged the platform that's already in existence to enable a few thousand folks to do this job passively and voluntarily. Waze is a system that utilizes the GPS information being pinged back from iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. It's been in existence since 2006, but last October the 3.0 version of the service introduced a fabulous new feature (so far, just for the iPhone users) that integrates with Twitter. This way, people can tweet on what's happening in their neighborhoods (including the good things, like street fairs) from right where they're standing.

Okay, maybe there aren't a thousand Waze users in a city like mine (Indianapolis) just yet, but it's surprising what you can find. There's updates on traffic accidents and reported police sightings (which are rarer in some cities than others). What Waze demonstrates is that there are ways of making use of data that can be collected passively from a crowd of users, in ways that do not jeopardize privacy.

8. Box.net. This is one of the services that comes to most folks mind when they know what a cloud app is. What's kept Box.net in the news, including just this month - and what keeps Box.net on our list this year - is a constant stream of innovations. Customizable synchronization is one example from last fall; and earlier this month, a completely revamped iOS app that enables features like uploading photos and videos to discrete folders. This puts Box.net on a par with dedicated photo-sharing services that simply can't expand its features list to Box.net's size. And just this morning, the company launched an enterprise-grade option for unlimited storage.

Next: Playing your own tune...

7. Audiobox.fm. My wife and I are both Pandora fans, although last year I found it ironic that both of us had been working - albeit without admitting it to ourselves - to make Pandora play music we actually already owned. Yes, that sounds like a pathetic waste of precious seconds, but there it is.

Audiobox.fm, launched last year, is the streaming service that folks need anyway: one which enables them to store the music they own in the cloud ($3.99 for 11 GB is pretty fair) and also play that music from any device using the service's own media player. ITunes users who were a bit discouraged last year by Audiobox.fm's dedicated player were treated this year to the option of streaming their own M3U files from cloud storage, to their player of choice (with variable results, especially in the case of Winamp, but not for lack of trying).

6. Joukuu. We introduced you to this storage maintenance service last month, calling it a "cloud cloud." It's a Web-based console for displaying in a single list the contents of files stored to Google Docs, Box.net, and Dropbox (Microsoft SkyDrive support still forthcoming). When you work with many colleagues on a project, and they all subscribe to different services (often the case with independent contractors who happen to be paired together), Joukuu is a true timesaver. And the drag-and-drop functionality of its outside-the-browser app saves you about a thousand clicks per day.

5. Hojoki. (If you weren't looking carefully enough, with definitions of Joukuu and Hojoki, you'd think this would be a foreign language course.) Entire billion-dollar-plus industries are built around so-called "collaboration platforms" that enable sharing and versioning of documents among members of teams. And yet there are individual cloud apps (Beanstalk, Dropbox, Evernote, GitHub) that are involved with the individual tasks around collaboration, and which all have managed identity, but which are not linked together.

So it really took more clever observation than creative genius to create Hojoki, but the premise works just the same as if genius were involved from the beginning. Hojoki is a messaging system that looks an awful lot like something you'd see from Salesforce. It builds a stream of people with whom you're already sharing contacts, and lets you organize them into groups for collaborative projects. The activities that all of you share within that group are pipelined through the Hojoki stream to everyone in that group, so it becomes an automatic task progress monitor. The service is currently in beta, although it's already made significant inroads, and there will be a business model attached to a premium service once the beta cycle is complete.

4. Do.com. Nothing more thoroughly demonstrates the rapidly changing state of the applications market in general than the fact that Microsoft Outlook's greatest competition in over a decade comes from something that isn't really an e-mail client. Do.com from Salesforce includes the level and ease of functionality for file sharing and collaboration that enterprises may have already attached to Outlook by way of add-ons, but which aren't available for everyday Outlook users.

And by tying Do.com to Gmail as its primary messaging service, Salesforce is wedging itself beneath Outlook and threatening to uproot it from home users' and small business users' systems. Do.com may not be a threat yet to Exchange, though it may put a dent in Hosted Exchange services for smaller businesses. Nonetheless, it's demonstrating that even an e-mail client with "2010" in its name is looking more and more like "1980."

Next: Is there beauty yet to be found in the cloud...

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.

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Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

TaxACT

TaxACT is an efficient way to file your taxes online, in either desktop or web-based versions. It offers two ways to enter data: the interview format, or the forms-based entry method. TaxACT also provides its users a highly reliable and robust alerts system to prevent costly mistakes generally caused by omissions or missed opportunities to maximize deductions. Regardless of the TaxACT version, all forms are IRS and State approved. The software was developed by professional accountants and CPAs.

You can see a tour of TaxACT online by clicking here.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 offers powerful streaming with a flexible environment for creating and delivering rich, interactive, multi-way social media experiences to a broad audience. You'll find a superior video experience, with new features such as Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, HTTP delivery support, and H.264 enhancements.

Check out the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to add interactivity and media streaming to your social media applications.

Wistia

Wistia is a provider of secure video sharing and collaboration tools for business. The company says that "the use of video in business has grown immensely as cameras and video production have become significantly more accessible. However, sharing and collaborating on this content with your team still has many challenges, including large file sizes, numerous video formats, privacy and security, and lack of collaboration environment." Wistia aims to solve those challenges.

You can get a free 15-day trial of Wistia by clicking here.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on ReadWriteWeb, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case, Web tech), powered by the community.

People build swickis on all kinds of topics, some people build a lot of them. Alex Holmes, for example, builds really nice looking swickis on topics like the 2008 Election, Ocean Animals and Home Buying.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and Smub will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself. Smub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

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Over the past two years, we at Wistia have spent a great deal of time helping businesses effectively use web video. We continue to be amazed at the innovative ways people are using web video to help their companies. The vast majority of these companies, surprisingly, are not media companies: they're businesses that incorporate video into their sales, marketing, or training to help scale those processes more efficiently.

Selling Large-Scale Autonomous Robotic Systems

As it turns out, giving potential customers a demo of autonomous robots at work tends to be a pretty effective selling tool. But finding the time, budget, and resources to arrange live demonstrations can be challenging. This is the problem that presented itself to a company we started working with recently. The company's solution was to privately share videos of the robots with prospects. The solution allows prospects to receive customized presentations, including videos and documents that are relevant to their needs. Sales reps are able to interact with more prospects at once and focus on prospects that are actually interested, rather than those that are casually looking.

Training Corrections Officers to Use GPS-Monitoring Bracelets

This company was launching the next version of its GPS-monitoring product and looking for a new way to quickly train a few thousand of its customers. Previously, it had relied on live web meetings to educate customers, going through multi-hour training sessions. Now, it records screencasts and shares the resulting videos with several thousand corrections officers in need of training. Each officer accesses a private collaborative area to view the videos and ask questions on his or her own schedule. The company has significantly reduced training expenses and freed up instructors' time to answer questions that benefit all trainees.

Casting International Theatrical Shows

Casting people for multiple productions that require 50 to 100 performers of various types from around the world is a major challenge. One company facing this logistical challenge turned to video for the answer. By recording auditions held around the globe and privately sharing the video with casting directors, it has been able to turn a coordination nightmare into a competitive advantage.

Medical Device Product Development

When developing a new medical device and the associated surgical procedure, every extra day in clinical trials can represent millions of dollars in lost revenue. One of the first companies we started working with has been able to speed up its development process significantly by putting video of clinical trial procedures on the web. As procedures are completed, the videos are immediately uploaded and shared with doctors and engineers all over the world (previously, they were mailed on DVDs). With web video, not only has the company been able to shorten the review process, but it has been able to bring more medical experts into the conversation. It has reduced iteration time for both product and procedure, shaving days off their time to market.

The above are just a few of the interesting ways companies both large and small are using video on a daily basis. Are you thinking about or already using video in a new and innovative way to help your business? If so, we would love to hear about it. Feel free to leave a comment or contact us at Wistia directly.