KickApps V2.0 blows away competition in DIY Social Networking
By Vivek | March 7th, 2007 at 12:46 am ET
Early today morning KickApps will be going live with amazing updates for the white label social networking platform. With this release, KickApps is rolling-up functionality of number of standalone social video and photo apps while also taking direct aim at Ning.com which had launched its upgraded platform last week. In case you haven’t been following KickApps, it was launched last year by Eric Alterman who had previously founded numerous companies including MeshNetworks which was acquired by Motorola in 2005. KickApps had $7 million in funding from Spark Capital and Prism Venture Partners.
KickApps will be launching 25 new widgets as part of the V2.0 including Premium Player Widgets, Forum, Slideshow, and a variety of HTML-based List Widgets. The most exciting part of the release is the all new Premium Player Widget. From the end-user standpoint the widget will enable watching of 360×270 px videos directly in the widget, without clicking through to a separate play page. As for the network owners, they will be able to roll in both premium and user-generated content to generate revenues without going through any video editing details. As part of building the widget they can easily control from which category the video content comes from. So they can have a set of 20 video listing in the widget from “Advertising” and “Electronics” categories.
KickApps is taking the video part a bit further by Media-Enabling the message boards, an integration that I haven’t come across before. Besides posting text messages, users can also leave audio, and video messages in their community message board. These widgets can than be embedded into webpages outside of KickApps community to encourage other users to join the discussions. Google has also been pushing Youtube into number of other places like Orkut, Google Reader, and Search results but none of these enable collaboration among users like KickApps. Even Private Messaging is now Video-Enabled, much like what Eyejot is doing. This messaging also has the capability to be broadcasted over to an entire community instead of just a single user. All along, videos can be recorded from your webcam directly. In my PoV besides being able to record videos I would like to have the ability to record screencasts which has a pretty strong use case especially on message boards. The Slideshow widget, although not as sophisticated, bring in the functionality offered by Slide.com.
The community home page for each social network has also been updated and now links to a simple URL(http://www.kickapps.com/networkname). Feel free to use this page as your site homepage or as a portal page for your KickApps-powered community. If you’d rather not use it, your community will not be affected.
On the whole lots of feature additions and upgrades to the platform that delivers advanced media management capabilities to end-users and webmasters. KickApps will soon be upgrading its reporting capabilities to provider advanced widget impression tracking capabilities to its affiliates. Looking at the holistic picture I think KickApps delivers powerful functionality that works well for ordinary users looking to try the platform for the first time or expert teams planning to deploy a customized social network with high grade features and complete tracking capabilities. Checkout some of the KickApps powered affiliate sites like ABC’s ‘Lost’ on UGO, Procter & Gamble’s TAG Body Spray, GolfNow.tv, KnowItAllVideo, and you can very well judge where KickApps is headed.
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