Upcoming CSS Changes

Update: We’ve pushed back the release of KickApps 2.2 to July 17.

On Tuesday, July 10 July 17, we’re going to roll out several new improvements to your KickApps-powered pages. We’re mentioning these updates because we’ve tweaked some of the underlying HTML on those pages and added some new style sheets for even more customization.

If you’ve implemented any custom CSS on your KickApps-powered pages, you should read our new CSS Update Tutorial on KickDeveloper before July 10 before July 17.

The new updates include:

• An updated home page that conforms to the other pages’ “clean blue and white” design theme and can be easily customized via CSS
• An updated member profile page that uses more HTML and bit less AJAX, for easier CSS customization
• A wider left column on the media play page, to accommodate a larger media player

If you haven’t implemented any custom CSS, stay tuned – we’ll send out more information about this release as we get closer to the launch date.

Eric on the ‘Apps’ in ‘KickApps’

In a recent post on his blog, Community In Context, KickApps’ founder Eric Alterman provides some perspective on the ‘Applications’ part of our company name and mission, comparing them to a set of complementary offerings by a slightly larger Internet enterprise, Google. Here’s a little taste, but you can read more after the jump.

KickApps was designed from the ground up to deliver a suite of hosted applications that developers can call on-demand. Although different in scope, platforms like Google Apps have a similar agenda. Over time the promise for developers is a limitless array of hosted tools and experiences that deploy quickly in a cost-effective manner. More >>

The Original Micro-Communities

Context is something we talk about a lot at KickApps. We’re strong believers in the idea that the web is evolving away from the ‘mega portal’ model of social media into the realm of ‘open portal’ micro-communities that mix premium and user-generated content in engaging ways. Every so often, we run into a skeptic who doesn’t see the micro-community trend. Truth is, not only is it already happening, but it’s been happening for decades.

Before UGC had a name, we used technologies like BBSs, IRC and USENET to make connections and form loose groups. But web-based message boards changed all that—they gave conversations the accessibility, permanence and context these other tools lacked. In this sense, message boards were the Internet’s first micro-communities, or at the very least, the first to really stick.

But message boards aren’t some relic of a bygone era. It’s hard to know how many are out there—various parties track anywhere between 40,000 and 90,000, but according to estimates compiled by John Breslin, an expert in the space and co-founder of Ireland’s largest bulletin board community, the so-called ‘boardscape’ is about 5 times larger than blogosphere—representing over 50 billion posts and growing at 400 million posts annually. As John admits, the blogosphere is much younger and growing much faster, but the absolute numbers are still staggering. This is living, breathing proof that micro-communities are (and always have been) one of the Internet’s dominant paradigms.

At KickApps, we see an enormous opportunity in the message board space. If the overwhelming majority of these communities have been thriving on what is essentially Web 1.0 technology, imagine if they could quickly and easily add robust, video-enabled experiences. The key is integrating this seamlessly with their existing infrastructure but even more interesting is the ability to monetize the experience (problems we’ve solved with our platform). The results could be explosive, injecting even more energy into a segment of the landscape that represents not only social media’s past, but its future.

Brands as Community Builders

BlogBusinessSummit.com’s Teresa Valdez Klein wrote an interesting piece titled Meet The Community Builders about the accelerating trend of businesses creating their own social networks, and comparing The AFL’s KickApps-powered community to that of one of our competitors.

In essence, she likes both, but cites the KickApps user experience as being more robust and polished than the other, which is still, in her words “pretty beta.” We’re very proud of our platform, and our goal is to build the most capable and flexible community platform out there, making it easy for members to have fun and contribute while giving you, the publisher, complete control over what’s going on in your community.

As Director of Propaganda (err, Marketing) I’m genetically predisposed to mention a few additional points that I think really differentiate us in the marketplace.

Breadth of platform
Starting on the backend, we have a full range of management and reporting features that makes it easy for you to control everything going on in your community–all built on a rock-solid, Java-based platform. For major brands, this is especially important. On the user-facing end, KickApps puts a full suite of social media functionality in the hands of anyone who has a website: video/audio/photo sharing, rating, and tagging, personal profiles and groups, content syndication through widgets, and premium video capabilities.

Time of implementation
Whether you’re a one person shop with limited technical resources or you have a team of hardcore developers ready to write code at the drop of a Twitter post, anyone can go live with KickApps in a matter of a few hours to a few days. It all depends on how custom you want to get.

Price
The entire platform is available for free using our ad-supported model, and if you want to build a community using your own ads (or none at all), we have a risk-free model in which you only pay for the page views delivered.

Thanks to Teresa for her interest in the platform. By the way, since she wrote the piece The AFL actually launched an enhanced version of their KickApps community. Check out the screenshot and link below.