Hojoki: A Place For All Your Cloud Apps

Hojoki: A Place For All Your Cloud Apps:
Cloud services are a dime a dozen these days, and all of them promise you wouldn’t have to carry a flash drive in your life. But how do you keep track of them? Sure, most have mobile versions of their apps and you can always use that on the go. However, seeing them all in one tool seems to be asking too much – or is it?
Hojoki is a web app that allows you to see a feed of all activities in your cloud apps, bringing together your Dropbox, CloudApp, Zendesk, and Basecamp, and more. It’s in Public Beta and is free for now – with a future pricing plan in store. So how does it work? Read on to know more!

Gather and connect

The first thing you need to do after signing up for this service is connect your cloud apps. Different apps have different ways of verifying your account. For instance, connecting Dropbox involves having to enter your RSS Feed, rather than signing in with your user name and password.

Connecting your cloud apps

Once all your apps are connected, your main feed (My Cloud) should now be updated with your most recent updates in all of them. Here are the main parts of a feed:

Anatomy of a feed

Click on a name and it filters all things done by that person. Click on a cloud app (icon on the bottom of a post) and it filters all posts from that app. And so on.

Collaborate

Each post has a Reply, Share and Delete option. These actions, however, are only visible within your Hojoki feed and will not change or delete the actual information from a cloud app. For example, deleting a post in Twitter from your Hojoki feed does not delete it in Twitter itself. These buttons are not there to change anything in your cloud app, but a way to interact with other Hojoki users.
This brings us to the next feature of the app: Workspaces. On the left pane, there’s an option to Create Workspace. This allows you to make a group for specific people that you work with. Give your workspace a name and assign a color. You can also add members right from the same pop up box. Additional settings include options to choose which data to include within that workspace.

Existing contacts in all of your cloud apps can be added to a workspace. Note, however, that adding a contact who isn’t on Hojoki will be notified through e-mail.

Customize

One of the great things I noticed about Hojoki are the many ways you can customize your feed by applying a wide variety of filters.
On the feed itself, clicking on an app logo filters your feed so it shows only activities done within that app. Clicking on a person’s name will bring a new feed with all their activity, and so forth. When an object is clicked, the previous feed slides to the left as it gets replaced by the filtered feed. To go back to the main feed, simply click on the My Cloud header on top.

Applying a filter for Dropbox

Aside from narrowing down content from the main feed, you have even more options on the right sidebar. Tasks and Events, for instance, lets you view tasks that were either started, finished or reopened. Other filters are self-explanatory, while others may require a bit of testing on your part so you can figure it out.

Sidebar filter options

Extras

In addition to its artsy feel, you can also change the wallpaper just in case you’re feeling more adventurous. Simply go to the Settings icon on the top right corner and click on the Theming button. Choose from 14 cool backgrounds and you’re done!

Change the scenery

I was surprised when I tried the Chat box. There’s actually some who replied and helped with my question – and quite quickly at that. This is a very impressive feature, considering this employs human resources. Below is my quick chat with Adam.

If there’s one thing this app requires from you (aside from signing up for a free account), it’s a fast internet connection. Leaving the app idle in less than satisfactory connections can drop you out. When this happens, you’ll have to hit the Reload button to start it back up again.

Conclusion

For a free app, Hojoki is feature-rich, super useful and a great way to get your apps organized into one unified platform. For me, I found it brought things to my attention which I missed seeing on the actual cloud app. It also cut down my browser tabs from ten to one.
Although it’s a great way to access everything you do in the cloud, there are still certain things you can only do within the individual applications themselves – like create a new note in Basecamp or reply to a tweet. And this is completely fine. Hojoki is not a replacement for any of these apps, but a linking agent for all users to be able to collaborate without having to access the actual app. That, for some, might be a more convenient way to manage multiple cloud applications.