iOS: Cloudee is an iPhone app that aims to help you actually share those video clips you take with your phone rather than let them sit and waste away in your camera roll. It does this by letting you quickly upload any video on your iPhone to the cloud and share it in a few clicks. It’s really easy to use, and you can check out the beta right now.
How Cloudee Works
You get your videos onto Cloudee in one of two ways: you take a new one with the app and upload it, or you choose an existing video to upload. Uploading existing videos with other video apps I’ve used has always been a bit tedious, but Cloudee’s taken steps to avoid that. You simply tap the up arrow in a list of videos, add a name and add it to a collection. Once you do this, it’ll start to upload in the background, and you can continue queuing up more videos. I was able to go through my entire collection of long-lost iPhone videos and set the ones I wanted to upload in about 20 minutes. It was really nice to be able to breeze through what can be a pretty annoying process.
Cloudee essentially provides you with an online video stream, much like Instagram does for photos, but with a little more organisation. When you upload a video, you create collections that are viewable by other users of the iPhone app or on the web. You can also set collections to be private if you don’t want to share them with anyone. Collections are just a simple stream of videos with likes and comments from others who have viewed them. I’ve created a few collections, like one for Lifehacker behind-the-scenes videos, plus others for friends, family, some weird things and my inside-the-vehicle car wash reviews. Everything is easily viewable and organised by date. You can email the URL to anybody (including yourself), or you can share it directly to Facebook and/or Twitter.
That’s pretty much all there is to adding your own content, but Cloudee also helps you keep track of what your friends are doing. You can add other Cloudee users as friends, and you’ll be able to browse their videos directly on your phone in the Friends section. Additionally, you can go over to the Activity section to see what everyone in your friends list has posted, whether it’s a new video or collection they’ve shared with you, or a comment or like on something you uploaded. If you want to watch any of these videos later, when you don’t have internet access (or don’t want to use your mobile data), you can download them to your suitcase for offline viewing.
Cloudee is a very focused app that takes on one task and handles it very well. It feels less like a beta and more like a finished app. That said, you will likely run into a few interface quirks here and there. Renaming a video, for example, isn’t the easiest thing to find. You have to tap a few times to go directly to the video’s page and press a circular button with an ellipses in it to find various options. The same goes for saving a video to a suitcase. Little things like this make certain actions longer to complete, but the more important tasks (like uploading) are so easy to accomplish.
How to Get Access to the Beta
If you want to give Cloudee a try, all you need is a Facebook account and an iPhone. Just visit my Lifehacker video collection and like or comment on one of the videos. This will prompt you to sign up via your Facebook account, and you’ll immediately be part of the Cloudee beta. Before you panic, liking or commenting on a Cloudee video will not post anything to your Facebook wall. It just registers on the Cloudee collection and nowhere else. You don’t have to worry — you’re not advertising in exchange for a beta invite. Whether or not you want to post about Cloudee on Facebook is totally up to you.
Once you’ve got an account, you’ll need to download the Cloudee app for iPhone. Then just go ahead and start uploading videos and sharing them with your friends.
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