Comments on: KickApps Wades into Ning Territory with Version 3.0

By: uloga

uloga — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:16:07 +0000

@John Jantsch

It looks like Kickapps to me ,same structure.Standard Kickapps widget player!

If you need some one to build your Kick community so you wouldn’t know it.

contact me at info@blinkweb.nl

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:35:34 +0000

You may want to check out http://www.rsitez.com and look at their membership dues integration with PayPal.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:45:51 +0000

@ #3

did you ever find out if KA allows membership fees?

Thanks.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:42:42 +0000

@ #10 & #11

why is it a positive–or negative–to have ‘kickapps/service/displayHomePageExperience.kick Action” in your url

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:14:05 +0000

@#10 Well, the fact that your _home page url_ contains this: ‘kickapps/service/displayHomePageExperience.kickAction’ kind of gives it away.

By: John Jantsch

John Jantsch — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:48:12 +0000

I looked very hard at both Ning and KickApps before launching the social community on my site. Like is so often the case, both do different things well. When it came right down to it, the ability to completely customize the interface was my deciding factor.

This is a kickapps community http://workbenc...pemarketing.com but you wouldn’t know it.

3.0 is a nice upgrade as KA has some catching up to do in the social aspects of the offering.

By: Kin Lane

Kin Lane — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:53:10 +0000

Competition is good. It is great to see all these great platforms out there.

I’m sure we’ll start seeing some die off and we’ll see consolidation soon.

In the mean time it is great to see how these networks can one up each other and develop some really cool stuff.

By: RK

RK — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:58:07 +0000

had been looking forward to this release. Had been using Ning for a while now. Its good for a basic network but does not have much flexibility with site customization.

RK
http://www.rent...drealestate.com

By: Siniq

Siniq — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:46:10 +0000

Ho freaken hum. What the hell are they really doing differently than anyone? Give me a break

By: Fabricio Zuardi

Fabricio Zuardi — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:24:41 +0000

@Erik Dungan #3

I know that Ning does, you as a network owner have the option to approve new memberships and manage the existing ones, if you pay for the “run your own ads” premium service you can get rid of the existing ads and use your own monetization model, if you need more control you can request the full php code of the application as well and integrate your billing system so you don’t have to manually approve/ban the members based on your rules. I don’t know about Kickaps.

By: John P.

John P. — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:17:10 +0000

John (nice name!)- That’s really interesting, what’s the name of your site that you added this “single line of JS code” to? I’m looking for something similar and I would love to see an example.

By: john Marko

john Marko — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:00:44 +0000

Interesting enough I met with KickApps a few months ago and they are working on some very interesting things. But my take away from the meeting was that the implementation process and the overall pricing model for their social networking application was a lot more involved and seemed contrary to what they were presenting to us. Afterwards , I signed-up at Ning (a very easy process), but it wasn’t in line with my interest to make money from a social networking solution as it seemed I was just paying Ning for the opportunity to place my own ad code. I wanted to be able to benefit from some up-sell opportunities and to interconnect all of my sub-sites and other likeminded sites together as a mega network. These two things I could not do with Ning. I decided to participate in a private beta trial of another startup from NYC called in2apps. They were able to meet most of the requirements I was looking for. They’re also targeting those in the online publisher space who are slightly more technical than Ning’s direct users which are primarily Facebook and Myspace users looking for more functionality then just managing their profiles. in2apps has provided me with the ability to add social networking features directly on my own website. They gave me a single line of JavaScript code and after I placed it within my html page (a thin client app loading directly into a tag) I was presented with a fully functional social networking application and there was even several member profiles pre-populated into the social network. This seems to be a feature – you can be part of the general in2apps network. The best thing about this whole process is that I got to have an early look at their application and I get to provide feedback to help influence the current and future applications being developed by in2apps. I also read that they are planning to release several other proof of concept applications for free to anyone with a website that would like to provide services like social networking, and classified listing to their end users.

-John

By: Erik Dungan

Erik Dungan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:49:05 +0000

Does KA or Ning support the creation of fee-based niche social networks? If I want to monetize my social network with membership fees (not ads), how can I do that?

By: Hashim Warren

Hashim Warren — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:57:03 +0000

the real loser in these social network app wars will be Movabletype and Wordpress.

By: damon

damon — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:25:13 +0000

ning has no defense (other that $50M I suppose) against this type of stuff, having oodles of mini social networks gives them no real lock in with users, unlike facebook etc…

of course, lock in dissappears with the data portability group hug