People’s personal clouds are growing, and it’s largely due to smartphones.  These gadgets are with us all the time, and have the power to store and access information, enable real-time communication on several levels, and make us more efficient with the time and places we do need to tap into our personal clouds.  The result is an overwhelming amount of information that’s trickling down to every consumer level, bombarding us with news streams, friend updates, location requests, push notifications and mobile alerts.

Springpad knows this is a growing matter that will need to be addressed.  It’s no longer an issue of merely searching YouTube for quality content, or scrolling back through Facebook profile pages.  As businesses begin to contextualize the web and its social penchant for curation, more business will emerge around individualizing web content in a way that’s beneficial to each user.  We know what all this data means for the social web.  And even though we’re still trying to figure out what it means for monetization and marketing, we’re just now beginning to discover what it means for the personal cloud.

With a few milestones under its belt (Springbad recently surpassed 1 million users), Springpad is competing with the likes of Evernote, a popular bookmarking service that gained significant market share with an early release.  Updating its iOS apps this week, Springpad added a few user-requested features, including voice memos and the ability to log in using other services like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.  Beyond signing in with other services, you can now share bookmarks to friends on Facebook and Twitter, adding another social element to its bookmarking service.

“Springpad users are highly engaged and invested in makingSpringpad better and better. Whether it’s through our Twitter focus sessions or our user community, Springpad users provide the most valuable feedback to enhancing the services,” said Jeff Janer, co-founder and CEO of Springpad. “The audio notes, social sharing and notebook rearrangement are just three of the many ways that they have contributed to improving Springpad.”

Springpad’s focus on user feedback exemplifies the company’s dedication to making the personal cloud work on an individual level.  Many of the service’s features take on a personal assistant roll, helping you make use of your saved content beyond the initial act of bookmarking.  “The business model for Springpad is around the personal assistant aspect to gauge consumer intent around products,” Janer goes on to tell me.  “We have a lot of interest from marketers around this.”

A similar approach has been applied to other services, even those with few social mechanisms, or entirely different product offerings from bookmarking.  Finding a way to make that work for Springpad’s purposes is the next step in growing the company.  What I like best about Springpad’s direction is its focus on the consumers, maintaining privacy and finding ways to make their content work effectively for their purposes.

This trend isn’t lost on other personal cloud services, as we see with Apple’s growing motives around MobileMe.  It’s rumored that MobileMe’s to be overhauled for a truly cloud-based strategy, where Apple hosts all of a user’s data on its own servers, allocating it to end user devices on-demand.  Becoming the “brain” of a larger service, Apple places itself at the center of an emerging, virtual marketplace.

RealNetworks also announced a new Exchange cloud service at MWC this week, letting users manage all their multimedia in one place.  Working across multiple devices, RealNetworks understands the potential behind cloud-based consumer products.  The question is, who will make the best use of the personal cloud?  Springpad is certainly headed in the right direction.