Massive Productivity Gain: Get all your employees on CloudApp

CloudApp is the single most important productivity and efficiency tool I use each day.  And if you've read my blogs, you know I use a lot of tools to make my time act as a force multiplier.  But CloudApp is the most indespensible -- I literally use it 20 to 50 times each day (Rapportive is a close second).

Until you use CloudApp to experience its magic, though, it can be a bit hard to understand what makes it so amazing.  So here's an easy, clear example of one of our employees, Nate, using CloudApp, so you can really get how it works.

We have a designer that works remotely.  Nate wanted to ask the designer to do some work on an iPhone screen he was developing.  Below is a screenshot of the conversation they had. (On a tangent -- we use GitHub, Basecamp & Pivotal Tracker in specific ways to manage projects via a Scrum methodology.  Let me know in the comments section if you'd like me to write a post with an in-depth look at how we use these tools).

Nate used a CloudApp link to let the designer see what he was referring to.

Here's the link Nate put into the thread, so you can see the same screenshot the designer saw: http://cl.ly/1H401K373S2d3Q0s1e1i

As I describe in this separate post on how to set CloudApp up on your computer, all Nate had to do to make that URL was take a screen shot of his computer (or phone).  That's it.  CloudApp takes care of the rest -- it listens on your computer for any screenshots you take, uploads them to the cloud, and turns them into a publicly accessible URL that Nate can then share.

CloudApp lets you and your employees quickly share what's on their screen.  It sounds like a small thing, but it's not -- and aren't the small things often the things that make the biggest impact anyways?  Being able to take a screenshot of my screen 20 to 50 times per day, and then share that with the people I'm interacting with, on email... on instant messenger... on Twitter... on Facebook... on the web... is a huge deal.  Give it a try; you'll really wonder how you lived without it.