I thought the Internet was the Internet, but you can also consider the Internet as “the Cloud”. And there’s a lot going on in “the Cloud,” from applications to hosting to content delivery systems. Several companies provide products and services to the Cloud, and Cloudbook has a directory of over 1200 of them.

(If, like me, you are somewhat confused about what Cloud computing is, Wikipedia can give you an overview. There’s also a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg that helped me understand it better.)

So anyway, the Cloudbook Products and Services Directory is available at http://www.cloudbook.net/directories/products-services-directory. The products and services listed there are divided into several broad categories, including applications, platforms, and network services. I decided to take a look at the applications and got a list of subcategories that included sales, marketing, data, collaboration, and human resources.

The “Collaboration” subcategory seemed interesting so I looked at that. I got a list of companies and basic description of the services. Some of them I had heard of (Zoho, Basecamp, SmugMug) and some I had not (Brainshark, GoView, etouches). Applications are listed in company name’s alphabetical order, not application name alphabetical order, which can be a bit confusing at first.

I still don’t quite understand what makes Cloud computing different from, say, applications that happen to be hosted on the Internet, but maybe I’ll get a better idea by exploring this directory. I was interested to see that this site was supposed to have more listings for government and research clouds as well as cloud groups, but alas, every one of the links I tried led me to a 404 error….