KickApps v4.0 is Live!

This morning we released a bunch of new features and functionality as part of KickApps v4.0. There’s a full list of what’s in 4.0 on KickDeveloper.com but here are some highlights.

Facebook Connect & Open ID/3rd Party Registration Support: Please see the Openness Manifesto post below by Alex for more detail. This is very powerful for a number of reasons in today’s world, namely it lowers the barriers to entry for members of KickApps websites to get active and it becomes a potent way of sharing activity and content on other websites (to me this is social advertising!).

In tomorrow’s world, this is the first step to a bridge between applications and websites that we use coming to us the way we want it and giving us as users a greater degree of control over our data, activity, content and applications. [Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and author of The Groundswell is doing a lot of interesting work about this in what she calls: 'Social Networks Will Be Like Air.']

Events API: Our support for Facebook Connect is based on a new API that we’ve made available. This API makes available all activity in a KickApps website to any application, service or website. In Facebook, that activity shows up in the member’s News Feed, their friends see this and the result is a click through. With the new API, you could take any activity and use it to inform any application or website. For example, you could feed your KickApps website’s activity into a CRM, CMS or analytics system. There’s been a lot of discussion around Social CRMs and this is a big step in enabling this for our clients.

Private Communities: KickApps clients can now create websites that are only accessible to members of their online community.

Points & Levels: A great way to incentivize activity on your online community–reward members with points and levels. KickApps clients can assign any number of points for any activity, i.e. 200 points for uploading a photo, or 50 points for commenting on a blog. Clients can also define levels that members reach based on the number of points they earn, i.e. at 5,000 points I become a Jedi Knight, at 15,000 points I become a Yoda!

There’s a lot in KickApps v4.0 and I’ll cover more of it here in the coming days. In the meantime, check out KickDeveloper.com for the release notes and also join the discussion here.

Our Openness Manifesto

Internet “openness” takes many forms, but with a common goal of enabling more empowering user experiences and explosive developer innovation. KickApps is thrilled to be at the forefront of this extraordinary movement and continues to embrace openness as an essential component of all new platform enhancements. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to meet the ever-changing needs of our clients and their audience with highly differentiated and customizable Web experiences.

The following principles guide our philosophy and product roadmap:

1. We believe that membership to a website should be defined by individual web publishers, brands and their customers. It’s our job at KickApps to present a flexible platform that delivers the precise level of openness demanded by the particular requirements of our customers and their members.
2. We believe that our platform must be flexible enough to enable the particular balance between openness, privacy and content protection required by our varied range of customers and their audiences.
3. We believe that our customers, not KickApps, are the sole owners of their membership data.  Our job is to provide the tools that enable the flexible use of that data in a highly secure environment.
4. We believe that openness is a two-way street.  Therefore KickApps supports a universal two-way approach to the flow of information between large social networks and our customer websites.
5. We believe that it should be as easy for third-party developers to develop applications for the KickApps platform as it is for our internal developers.

With the release of KickApps 4.0 today, we continue to further this philosophy with the following extensions to our platform:

Single Log-In: Support for multiple log in credentials and the ability to register for any KickApps powered website using your Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo!, OpenID or MySpace username and password. KickApps clients may choose (at their discretion) to allow their members to participate in their communities without having to recreate or remember multiple usernames and passwords.

Facebook Connect and Beyond: Members of a KickApps powered community can choose to broadcast his or her activity inside a KickApps-powered community to their Facebook News Feed, thereby letting their Facebook friends know that they’ve done something interesting on another site. This in turn can drive traffic from the member’s Facebook friends back to the KickApps powered community.  For example, if a user has commented on a video, blog or photo on a KickApps powered community, he can opt to publish that comment his Facebook Profile and News Feed

Event Hooks: The KickApps platform offers “event hooks,” that allow our customers to integrate their choice of actions to other services in a way very similar to Facebook Connect.  Facebook is an important place for a publisher to syndicate user activity, but there are many other destination locations that are highly relevant to particular web publishers.

Member Hubs: KickApps customers can opt to allow members to place any RSS feed on their member profile pages.  The benefits to members are unlimited, but one notable example is that members can easily place up-to-the-minute feeds to their Twitter and Facebook Status on their profile pages.

Member Activity Portability: Members of KickApps’ communities can now take their activity feeds from KickApps powered communities to any Web location that accepts standard RSS feeds.

Old school notions of “walled garden” Web experiences are fading fast. As a result, the Web is an increasingly social place, even beyond the major social networks.  Our mission at KickApps is to enable every Web experience—from websites created by audience-driven media companies to those developed by enterprise-oriented product companies—the ability to launch their user experiences and brand across the web with an ever-growing platform of powerful, highly customizable technologies.

Please leave a comment and let us and other KickApps’ers know what you think about openness.