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.