Bootstrap Your Social Network with KickApps

ScreenshotSuppose you wanted to create your own community networking site, with memberships, discussion forums, profile pages, audio and video sharing. Or suppose you wanted to add those features to an existing web site, to move into the Web 2.0 interactive world. How much code would have you to write? According to KickApps, the answer is “none.”

KickApps bills themselves as a white label social media networking site. What that means is that you can sign up for an account at KickApps and use their platform to create your own site, picking and choosing from a menu of features that you want to include – things like video and photo sharing, blogging, groups, and message boards. Signing up is a matter of filling out a trivial form, and in just a few clicks you’ll have a site up and running at a hosted subdomain.

From there, you have quite a number of options for customization and enhancement. You can use their new CSS tools for WYSIWYG modification of your site’s look and feel, and you can integrate the KickApps tabs directly in to your existing web site by including your site’s home page as a tab. At the other end, you have access to a full developer API, that lets you use the KickApps infrastructure while skinning it entirely with your own site design.

They also have an interesting pricing structure. You’re welcome to come in and create a site for free, and use it all you want. If you do this, they’ll show some banner ads on it. You also control one ad slot on the page yourself. When your site gets more popular and you want to monetize it, you can insert your own ads in all of the slots on the page, buying each slot from KickApps as you want it. So, if you think you can do a better job of selling ads for your targeted audience then they can, you make a few bucks on the difference in ad rates between what you buy the slots for and what you sell them for.

KickApps has been around for a while (they just released version 3.0 of their platform), and their tools are quite easy to use. And they’ve got a proven track record – check out the list of major companies who have used their platform. If you have truly unique networking ideas, or free programming time, you may still find it more efficient to write your own code – but they certainly have a large number of community use cases well-covered.

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