Everybody wants to get in on social networking and user-generated video. Reality Digital, a white-label YouTube that lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, raised $6.3 million in a series B financing. OpenView Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round. The company previously raised $2 million in a series A from private individuals in November, 2005.

In addition to video-uploading, Reality Digital’s platform can also handle audio, blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forums—pretty much any feature that you’d see on MySpace or Youtube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns. Customers include MTV Networks, the Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, and the Daily Reel Reality Digital also powers the back-end of Adobe Premier Express, which is Flash-based software for creating video mashups. Reality Digital competes with KickApps, VSocial, and VMix.

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AOL, a company that is supposedly on the block themselves, seems to be on somewhat of an acquisition bender lately. In addition to a number of smaller purchases like Yedda and Goowy, and not a day after the announced $850 million acquisition of Bebo, rumors are popping up that AOL is preparing to acquire yet more companies in the coming weeks.

The next may be KickApps, a service for creating social networks, widgets and other services, says Kara Swisher (who’s rarely wrong, except when she said “two words: No sale” regarding our prediction of a Bebo acquisition). She says the company may be bought by AOL for $90 million.

We’ve followed KickApps closely, first covering it at launch in July 2006 and, most recently, when they released v. 3 of the service and started to wade into Ning territory. We also compared them to eight competitors in July 2007.

Does KickApps fit within AOL’s overall widget/socialnetwork/advertising strategy? Sure, maybe. It’s clear they’re embracing social networks, and widgets, already. KickApps gives them some technology and customers to continue that push and offer customized solutions for third parties. That can create lots of inventory to sell ads into as well. On the other hand, I don’t think AOL has fully verbalized their go forward strategy yet. They may not even understand it internally.

KickApps has raised $17 million in venture capital over two rounds of financing - the most recent in August 2007.

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The Viacom-backed Flux social network, which launched just last September, is really taking off.

Flux is a partially distributed social network. Like Ning (and more recently KickApps), it’s a place for sites to easily create a new social network, or bolt a social network onto an existing site, and add users from other platform social networks with a single click. Ning has the benefit of a big head start and over $44 million in funding. Since launching way back in late 2005, 165,000+ social networks have been created on Ning.

The two companies are serious rivals. In late November we published a point-by-point comparison of Flux and Ning as seen by Ning CEO Gina Bianchini. Few punches were pulled.

Flux is only a few months old, but had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands - at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands. In late November they opened the platform and anyone could join and create a social network.

Today, Flux says, they have grown to over a million registered members and 2,000 self-service created social networks. They also also released a developer API to give users more flexibility in creating social networks.

Flux may have far fewer social networks than Ning at this point, but the heft of the Viacom properties is clearly giving it a traffic boost. Comscore says Flux now has 5.8 million monthly unique visitors, compared to just 2.1 million for Ning (update: it has been pointed out in the comments that Compete data tells a different story).

Update 2: Flux may be taking off, but not as much as we thought. The January spike in the comScore data was a little suspicious, so we asked comScore to double-check that it was right. Turns out it was an “artificial increase” due to traffic not requested by users. comScore is revising its numbers to filter out the bad data. We’ll let you know what those are as soon as we hear.

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KickApps is implementing a lot of new features and capabilities with its newest release, version 3.0, which debuts today. For a complete list of the improvements, you can check out the company’s official release (see the summary in the second half).

The upgrades are largely divided between those that appeal to advanced publishers and those that appeal to novice consumers. The API Developer Kit, which we covered just a little while ago but is still considered as part of this release, certainly appeals to the technically advanced by allowing them to access KickApps’ architecture directly. More sophisticated network activity reporting will also appeal to advanced users who need to track the “performance” of their online communities.

In the other camp, we have new tools that help non-technical people build social networks with KickApps. As the press release puts it, “anyone can launch a full-featured social media community in minutes.” This was always true with KickApps, strictly speaking, but until now the company has never made it easy for people lacking HTML and CSS skills to make attractive, non-standard sites.

Now the platform provides not only a selection of site themes but also a WYSIWYG Site Styler that lays on top of your site and lets you point and click your way to a new look. The Affiliate Center (KickApps’s term for a site’s control panel) has also been redesigned to hold the hands of novice users a bit more. If you haven’t created a video, added a forum, or loaded a profile picture, it will suggest you take these steps to foster your community. A new Flash-based widget studio, announced in beta today but not yet available publicly, will also make the creation of advanced widgets more feasible for regular consumers.

KickApps has always differentiated itself from competitor Ning by focusing on content publishers and media companies. While Ning appeals to individuals who want to easily set up social networks for their various interests, KickApps appeals more to organizations who are looking for ways to publish and market their content online through social media. KickApps insists that its new tools are targeted at its own long tail, not Ning’s; that is to say, intended for smaller yet still serious content publishers. However, the more accessible KickApps makes its product - and this release is predominantly about making it more accessible - the more it will overlap with Ning and compete directly with that company.

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KickApps, provider of “white label” social networking functionality for existing websites, has been making strides to open up its hosted platform to both web and application developers.

Webmasters who want to integrate KickApps’ social networking features - such as user profiles, videos, photos, and blogs - typically use the company’s Affiliate Center, an online control panel with which you can modify the way those features look and function. For power users, KickApps provides an API that gives webmasters more direct access to KickApps-hosted data so they can build more highly customized websites. Today they’ve published a KickApps API Developer Kit intended to help its customers take fuller advantage of that API by introducing them to its capabilities and inviting them to initiate custom development projects, which require close collaboration with the KickApps team.

More notably, KickApps has adopted Google’s OpenSocial developer platform standards and is working with Facebook to adopt that company’s standards as well. Just over a month ago, Bebo announced a developer platform that was essentially a clone of Facebook’s own platform. Bebo’s intention was to attract developers who had already designed their applications for Facebook and who would prefer not to rebuild them under a different platform standard. In the hours following Bebo’s announcement, Facebook made it clear that it encouraged the adoption of its platform standards by other social networks. KickApps appears to be the first white label social networking provider to get on board with this, and the second company after Bebo to declare its support for both OpenSocial and Facebook standards at the same time.

As for its OpenSocial support, KickApps says that it’s ready now for developers who want to build OpenSocial applications for KickApps-enabled websites. No applications have been developed yet, however, apparently because developers are not quite ready to take advantage of the standard.

KickApps will be releasing its latest version in a couple of weeks; we’ll return at that point to review its newest features. Our latest broad assessment of KickApps can be found in a round-up of white label social networking platforms we published this past summer.

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KickApps, provider of a platform for building white label social networks, will announce today that it has taken two initiatives to make the social networks hosted on its platform more accessible to iPhone users. First, all videos uploaded to KickApps affiliate networks will be viewable on the iPhone despite the device’s lack of Flash support. Secondly, the company is releasing developer tools that will enable affiliates to format their networks for display on the iPhone.

As of August 24th, KickApps has begun automatically converting uploaded videos to both Flash and QuickTime format. Over the next month or so, the company will also be converting its entire back catalogue of Flash videos to QuickTime. When an iPhone user attempts to view a KickApps-hosted video, he or she will be dished up a QuickTime file, whereas desktop clients will continue to load the standard Flash applet.

While technically speaking this probably wasn’t too hard to pull off, it is a nice gesture by KickApps to potential customers who see the things that other Web 2.0 companies - like Facebook, Meebo, and Netvibes - are doing with the iPhone and want in on the action. As the first white label social networking platform to roll out iPhone features, it also earns the company some bragging rights.

Given that Apple will likely add Flash support to the iPhone before too long, their second announcement about formatting KickApps networks for the iPhone will have longer lasting significance. The company will now allow affiliates to create two CSS files for each of their networks’ pages: one to style the page for a regular browser and one for the iPhone. The appropriate stylesheet will be served after a snippet of JavaScript determines the client’s browsing environment.

KickApps has created a test network (pictured above) at KickFlix.net to demonstrate how formatting and video playback works on the iPhone. While not terribly pretty, this demo lists videos and members in a way that fits nicely into the iPhone’s smaller screen. Unfortunately, the company did not also format the actual video and member pages for the iPhone. This oversight makes me wonder how easy it will actually be for affiliates to create CSS files that make all of their networks’ pages fit the iPhone.

While these offerings feel a bit like KickApps rushed to get them out the door, it’s good to see them taking the lead in the highly congested white label social networking space. Let’s hope that other companies like Ning follow suit.

For more coverage of KickApps, see our recent roundup of do-it-yourself, hosted social networking solutions.

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The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.

The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent. While definitions of “social networking” may vary, social networks are primarily defined by member profiles and some sort of user generated content.

There are roughly three types of companies that have emerged in the space of white label social networking. The first provides hosted, do-it-yourself solutions with which customers can largely point and click their way to a brand new social network. Companies of this type interact minimally with their customers and rather focus on providing the network-building tools that they demand.

We have taken a sample of nine of these companies - Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite - all of which provide free baseline services, and reviewed them individually below. We have also included the chart on the right summarizing all of these companies’ offerings. Credit for initial research into these companies goes to Jeremiah Owyang who compiled a comprehensive list of white label social networking services.

The second type of company provides social networking software for download and installation onto one’s server. The third type works very closely with clients to build a social network based on their needs. These companies might suite your needs much better than any do-it-yourself social networking service, so you may want to check out companies such as Social Platform (a personalized service) or phpFox (a downloadable solution). We’ll take a deeper look at these services in Part 2 of this post.

Out of the services that we review below, we found that Ning provides the best platform for setting up good-looking, sophisticated social networks with minimal effort. KickApps provides the best platform for integrating social networking components into existing websites. CrowdVine and Haystack are viable options for organizations that are looking for simple social networks to improve personalized communication online. CollectiveX is most suitable for existing groups that want to collaborate online. And GoingOn provides a promising hybrid solution with capabilities shared by both Ning and KickApps.

More details on each are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

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KickApps has continued to grow in the face of strong competition from high profile startups such as Ning.

TechCrunch first covered KickApps in July 2006. I had the opportunity to speak with CEO Alex Blum this week. Blum was previously President and COO of JumpTV and before that Vice President of Product Marketing for AOL.

KickApps’ numbers aren’t as impressive as Nings. KickApps powers over 3000 social networking sites compared to Nings 67,000+, yet Blum believes that KickApp’s offering is a superior platform.

The overall KickApps experience is thorough. Nothing obvious is left out. White label sites have a full choice of 13 features; profiles, guest books, video and feeds are some of the options. The backend is simple to use and smart at the same time. The moderation of videos option doesn’t just present the uploaded video; numerous screenshots are automatically generated to immediately give a reviewer a good idea of what is contained in each video.

Widget/ embedding support is extensive and delivered complete with DNS masked domain; users never link to KickApps itself, the specific domain is always presented in the embedding code. It’s a small thing but one that defines KickApps in comparison to Ning.

KickApps also offers an open API and developer kit. Blum told me that whilst most sites simply use the features offered, a number of high level users have implemented the API on their sites, delivering a custom solution.

KickApps comes in two flavors and the difference between the two only comes down to advertising. Free users get full range of functionality with KickApps taking a part of each site for advertising. This doesn’t prevent free users from advertising themselves, simply a portion of each site must include a KickApps ads. The paid version is perhaps remarkably not sold on a licensed basis, KickApps charges a CPM rate per site served, meaning that less successful sites pay a lower rate. Blum believes that this model is fairer in that sites pay proportionality to their success, and therefore everyone wins; it therefore becomes in KickApps best interest to offer the best possible platform and experience to maximise revenue.

Overall it’s a great offering. Strictly from a publishers view point the ability to keep your own domain on top of the white label service is compelling, and the feature set is remarkably easy to use and set up. The company has numerous existing deals and will officially announce a tie up with Vibe Magazine today. Given what I’ve seen I have little doubt that despite the competition KickApps will go from strength to strength, it’s a white label social networking platform that delivers.

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KickApps, a white label social networking software service, launched publicly today. Think of it as a way for any web site to add functionality similar to MySpace or YouTube.

After looking at the way that the system works, I can say that KickApps looks strong on a technology level. While major media companies seem excited these days about buying social networking sites, this is a way they can quickly leverage that type of technology without the monster price tags. Will users go for it? That depends on whether the huge market share of MySpace is due to a lack of options or it’s there because people only want to belong to one social network online.

KickApps was founded by Eric Alterman, a serial entrepreneur who has in the past specialized on commercializing technology licensed from the military. KickApps is the end result of a vision Alterman has had for years, he told me, only recently becoming viable with the increased visibility of social networking and media sharing technologies.

The company announced $6 million in series A funding from Spark Capital and Prism Venture Partners last month. There are two service levels available, free and white label subscriptions will be accompanied by advertising that KickApps will take some or all of the revenue from.

The basic idea behind this service is relatively simple but the end result is a highly customizable social networking site for admins and a relatively compelling experience for users. Fields available for users to populate are customized by the KickApps customer, as well as a wide variety of permission options, ten nice widgets available for posting media off-site and detailed data reports on traffic and use.

Companies employing KickApps will like the content moderation tools and ability to drive traffic back to their own websites. Users will likely appreciate the familiarity with the media sharing methods. Setting up an account is free, so readers can check out the system for themselves as well.

I asked about Open ID and the company told me only that multiple implementations by a single white lable customer would support porting of user identity. That’s unsurprising but dissapointing, as it’s questionable how many niche social networking sites users will sign up for before becoming exhausted.

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