Wiggio is a Boston-based cloud collaboration startup that’s working its way up the same niche market that helped spawn at least one other incredibly fast-growing network – students. And Wiggio is surprisingly similar to Facebook in that its hosting service puts a huge emphasis on the social element and collaboration.

The Boston Herald reported that the company has officially crossed the one million user milestone as of this week, now that the cloud firm is expanding outside the campus population, though students remain the focus for Wiggio.

“Our thing is to give students the functionality they need to get things done,” a rather familiar statement released by Wiggio co-founder Dana Lampert in recognition of the landmark. A Cornell grad, he founded the startup with two brothers, Rob and Derek Doyle of Cambridge. “We keep it so simple. That’s how we get growth.”

Wiggio has taken the mix-and-match approach to differentiating itself from the countless other cloud startups other there. It combines elements from note-taking tools such as Springpad (which coincidentally added collaboration functionality to its platform earlier this month), a synchronized calendar and built-in communication tools together with the standard stuff we’ve come to expect from cloud platforms.

Differentiating the feature set is an important tactic right now, and Wiggio’s stance is to build cloud tools specific for student needs. Collaboration is key to actionizing the cloud, and we’re seeing niche products emerge with groups like students and lawyers in mind.  The interface design was of particular importance for Wiggio, aiming to attract even the most apprehensive users with simplicity and accessibility across multiple devices.  Wiggio even tests its UI on a group of 4th graders before rolling out feature updates to ensure a comprehensible user experience.

Dropbox, Box has taken the lion’s share of the industry buzz, and the rest has been gobbled up by other players that are competing with the same basic angle, most recently the launch of Google Drive.

Google’s latest product has been pushed back several times over the years, and has supposedly been in development since at least 2006. The bad timing of the launch may result in that massive investment going to waste, but then again the search giant has proven at least once before that it can make a grand entry into an already over-crowded space by building more functionality around the tools we already use.