It seems like Tariq Krim, founder of the early ‘organise your digital life’ play that was NetVibes has been on a journey – a journey to tackling fundamental problems about our online life, like how to interface and organise it all. Seems like he just can’t let go of that idea. And the Atomico and Mangrove Capital backed Jolicloud has been an ambitious evolution of this, to create an apps-based interface to the cloud, as well as a Netbook OS, which 600,000 users responded to. But today Krim unveiled a major pivot for Jolicloud in the form of a new product which seems to bring all of that learning into a new place which very much speaks to the proliferation of social networks, photo apps and other services.
Because it’s abundantly clear now that half the time you can’t recall if you where tagged in a photo on Facebook, mentioned in a post on Twitter or snapped in Instagram. So Jolicloud have realised that the apps platform they’ve built is now going to work rather well as an aggregator and interface to your Facebook timeline, Twitter feed, photo apps accounts, you name it. But not just that – Google documents and music as well.
Some 35,000 people have already pre-registered for a beta they didn’t know anything about, so they have that at the get-go.
Jolicloud is now billing itself as the “personal cloud.” Does that mean the first iteration failed? I guess that depends on your perspective, and its clear that the shift of one very big player like Apple towards the cloud, with iCloud, had in part prompted a Jolicloud’s move away from trying to be a similar kind of service.
Instead it’s moving upstream to the aggregator space.
Speaking at the Dublin Web Summit, Krim said Jolicloud will be a service agnostic, pulling in APIs from all the obvious players (Google, Facebook etc) so users can aggregate and search their online life. This will include Dropbox, Tumblr and Evernote.
“We’re not building a feature, we’re building a platform. Google actually quite likes this,” Krim told me. “We’ll be a ‘Mobile First’ company now.”
Additionally they’ve built an iPhone and Android app which will be out soon. For now though the large private beta will be going for the next few weeks, possibly even months, depending on how it goes.
Jolicloud is also working on “suggested collections” to help you organise photos, personal content etc.
In order to parse what is inevitably going to be a huge amount of data, Jolicloud has built its new platform in a Javascript technology called Node.JS. This, they say, will give them the ability to process exponentially more data than even a year ago.
You can register for the beta here