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.