Anthony Bradley

Yesterday I met with the CEO Alex Blum and CMO Michael Chin of KickApps. KickApps is a cloud based environment for building rich community-based web properties. They focus on the consumer market as a white label extension to an organizations web site. Their customer base is heavy in the entertainment industry which makes sense given their offering is strong on multi-media.

Some interesting issues came out of this meeting. These are not in order of priority.

1. One of the coolest aspects of their offering is the widget building capability which can be done by non-developers. This reinforces the trend on the blending of mashups and social software sites with mashup approaches becoming a primary way to add capability and project capability (syndication). KickApps supports both OpenSocial and the facebook API.
2. As a vendor you have to let people play for free. Anyone can go to www.kickapps.com and open a free account and begin building their community site. You pay them if and when you go to production. I created an account and began building to get a feel for the user experience. It is a robust environment and with that comes some complexity but it is manageable. As a non-developer (web or otherwise) there is much you can do but to build some of the really interesting sites their customers have you need a professional web development team. Still, the key here is that you can build now and pay later.
3. There is a divide between externally facing and internally facing social technology providers more so than simply a marketing focus. Externally facing platforms like KickApps, though many can be used internally facing, often focus more on ease of everything, web presence and projection, scalability, advertising management, and a business leader sale whereas those internally facing focus on integration, enterprise content management, enterprise manageability, and a technology leader sale. This is in addition to the social functionality of course. This divide will eventually close over time but for now it is the way of the world.  
4. People need services too. In addition to a platform, KickApps offers services on developing a social media strategy and designing the community goals and experience. Currently, the professional services marketplace is seriously lacking in providing services around the design and implementation of social applications (defined as the right social software tools targeted at a well defined community and business purpose).

I’m sure there are more lessons here but this is enough for one blog post.