Social Media and WEB 2.0.

If you’ve heard about MySpace from your kids or watched a video on YouTube, that’s what social media it’s all about. People under thirty are spending more time socializing on the Web than watching television---the numbers aren’t even close. The venture capitalists in Silicon Valley call this type of internet communication Web 2.0. At bottom, Web 2.0 mainly about empowering website audiences with the ability to participate in the conversation happening at their favorite web destinations. And websites audiences are talking back with video, audio and multi-media presentations as easily as you and I pick up a telephone. E-Mail and traditional voice conversations have been replaced by video and text messages.

While websites like MySpace and YouTube offer a big leap forward in terms of information sharing and participation, Web 2.0 experiences often bring a lack of content focus and host of new security issues. In general, Web 2.0 experiences are uncontrolled, un-moderated and sometimes unmanageable. The government, especially every branch of the military, large corporations with a message and image, educational institutions, religious organizations, organizations of all sorts, and a host of other community Website needs to offer effective alternatives to websites like MySpace where students, customers, employees, parishioners, club members, servicemen, their families and government employees can participate in social networking where there can be levels of moderation and reporting that more properly balance the virtues of security, privacy and openness. These specialized communities (within an ever widening age demographic) will absolutely participate in social networking as sure as I use the telephone. It is therefore imperative that we provide them an appropriate environment to do so.

Enter KICKAPPS Corporation www.kickapps.com . KickApps Corporation is a technology platform company that enables the kind of functionality associated with the internet phenomena of social media (or social networking).

KickApps Corporation (Kick Application) is a centrally hosted social network platform capable of powering thousands of separate websites with social networking functionality, including video blogging, personal home pages, messaging and the full range of user capabilities found at commercial sites like MySpace and YouTube. But the KickApps platform also provides a suite of reporting, data mining, media management and administrative tools necessary to moderate a diversity of unique online communities. Screening pornography, classified, copyrighted or inappropriate material is made easy. The company deploys community functionality at distinct websites all over the world from a central server farm with sophisticated APIs (Application Program Interfaces) for seasoned web developers and with “widgets” (snippets of embeddable code) for less skilled webmasters. Functionality includes dynamic list generation of all media types, highly customizable page templates, video uploads and instant webcam capture, media and member tagging, tracking, and reporting and custom category taxonomies. Although the KickApps web site is focused on the commercial user and therefore leaves the impression that they only do external hosting, for many focused applications, the full scope of the hosting options for KickApps includes hosting both easily-constructed sites and internally constructed internet or intranets web sites (ie military, government) .This is important since there is quite a big mismatch between the ease-of-sharing for the vast majority of specialized web site users and the ease-of-sharing that commercial sites using KICKAPPS can create around their own spaces.

Kickapps provides specialized websites with an alternative to commercial social networking like YouTube or MySpace. In the context of many communities, maintaining a baseline of moderation and reporting is essential. As an illustration, it is very clear that servicemen away from home are using sites like YouTube and MySpace to communicate with their family and friends. Families of servicemen are communicating with each other in the same way. It’s also clear that there will be times when fair and anononymous reporting and moderation will be necessary for good business or military security reasons (and in some cases more direct intervention will be necessary). The KickApps platform enables web developers of websites all the media management, moderation, reporting, and oversight functionality while still allowing the healthy conversation, effective sharing of information and experiences, resource allocation and UGC (User Generated Content) necessary to provide a satisfying user experience.

It’s clear that industry, military and civilian government can benefit greatly by taking advantage of the lightening fast pace of commercial platform development. New releases happen monthly at companies like KickApps Corporation and each are generally packed with new features and upgrades. The July 5th 2.2 release will offer new APIs and host of instantly deployable video players supported by a sophisticated media management system. KickApps presents a great opportunity for Web developers to move quickly and inexpensively by solving some of the most challenging and time-consuming programming tasks with fully realized hosted applications. You can learn more at www.kickapps.com. Check out a recent Kickapps review (below) from TechCrunch (an industry-leading tech blog) and feel free to arrange a private consultation with me through GLG.

Dr. Stanley B. Alterman

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/20/kickapps-white-label-social-networking-that-delivers/