Opening Up

When your goal is building the industry-leading white label SaaS social media platform you’re essentially creating applications and products that will be customized and you have to take into account the various ways people will choose to deploy them. A key facet that has to go into the design is flexibility and extensibility and you need to create an environment that invites third party developers into the mix.

We’re taking a major step in making the KickApps hosted platform even more flexible and extensible by continuing to expand the KickApps API Developer Kit. Affiliates can use the Dev Kit to access some of KickApps’ Platform’s features ‘a la carte,’ modify workflows, integrate with third-party functionality, and deeply integrate KickApps-powered functionality with their own hosted pages and media.

This is a powerful option for affiliates with highly custom needs to integrate KickApps-powered social media experiences beyond what is already provided by the hosted platform. To use the Developer Kit and related APIs, you”ll need programmers, servers, and a licensing budget. The first thing you should do is to scope out your project and evaluate whether you can achieve your goals using our hosted Platform or if APIs make sense. For the typical KickApps implementation, integrating our free, powerful hosted platform will be the right approach (using custom CSS, HTML, Widgets, client side JavaScript customizations, feeds and the SSO plug-ins).

You can get more information about the KickApps Developer Kit, including a white paper, at http://www.kickdeveloper.com/api.

In addition to the KickApps Developer Kit we’re implementing the open application standards defined by Facebook Platform and Google’s OpenSocial™. We’re going to be the first white label hosted platform to do this and will enable thousands of developers around the world to extend their applications and widgets to thousands of social media communities powered by KickApps.

We’re extremely excited about opening up the Platform. We believe that it’s a win-win for our publishers and it also creates new opportunities for developers to create cool social apps that live between niche networks and general networks like Facebook and MySpace. This openness reflects real-life social habits and more than anything is the foundation for even greater levels of engagement with people.