ControlC touts itself as an online manager for your desktop clipboard — that background software that records of all the copy-and-paste or cut-and-paste actions you've made. But it's potentially capable of much more than that, in fact, it could be used as an automated microblogging tool like Twitter.
Once you've signed up for a ControlC account and downloaded the software for your platform (Mac, Windows and Linux are all supported), ControlC will run in the background and silently upload all the things you copy or cut as you work.
By default all uploaded items are encrypted and marked as private which means no one else can see them.
ControlC is quite smart too, it recognizes URLs and automatically captures a screenshot of the site in question. For links to images it will pull in the actual image as a thumbnail. When it comes to files you've put in the clipboard it won't actually upload the file, rather it stores the name of what you copied.
Once your items are stored you can access them by logging to the site and decrypting them with a password. From there you can edit, star and comment on your posts as well as make them public for others to see.
Any information you do choose to make public can be accessed by your friends on the site, via RSS, or, according to TechCrunch, through an API, but unfortunately I didn't see any mention of an API in my testing.
Still, the RSS feed of public items means it wouldn't be hard to write a script to parse the public feed and post it on to Twitter or Tumblr or any of the other popular microblogging services out there. Which isn't to say the ControlC doesn't have its own community. It does, but because it's relatively new there aren't that many members yet.
There are half a dozen other possible uses as well — like adding your clipboard history to Gmail by piping the RSS feed through an RSS-to-e-mail service or adding it to your iGoogle or Pageflakes homepage. A full-fledged API would add even more possibilities.
The downside is the manual management process — marking selected items as public. But given that we all copy information we probably don't want made public, erring on the side of caution is a smart move by ControlC. A tip for Mac users, if you use the excellent app Little Snitch, you can approve and deny ControlC's uploads on an individual basis. Depending on how much you copy this could be either annoying or a helpful filtering mechanism.
There's a bulk import/export feature for making backups or uploading large files, but regrettably it's only available with a premium subscription which will set you back $40 a year, and frankly that's a bit steep.
Still, ControlC is very well done and could be useful far beyond the scope it's targeting. It could easily be used for anything from a simple bookmarking app to a more robust version of Google Notebook or other web clipping service. Because ControlC isn't tied to the browser you can grab just about any content from any program which makes it much more flexible than traditional online snippet apps.
One thing to keep in mind if you already use a desktop clipboard manager like Quicksilver or others, is that every time you scroll through your history and paste something new, that snippet will be uploaded to ControlC again. And again and again. The same goes for auto-complete apps like TextExpander.
In the process of cutting and pasting to rearrange this post I ended up with twelve duplicates of the same paragraph (couldn't decide exactly where to put that graf). It's not ControlC's fault since what Quicksilver does is store its own multi-entry clipboard file and then selectively add those items to and from the system's single-entry clipboard, but it might cause some headaches if you do a lot of clipboard history recall.
One other minor thing that might bug some people is that ControlC will show up in the dock as a running application even though there's no need to interact with it.
ControlC is an open-source project and at the moment it's a private beta, but you can sign up using the code: beta4040. [The sign up page says that code won't work after Feb 5, but it worked fine for me this morning.]
[via Lifehacker]
