Even white label social networks like Kickapps realize there is no use competing with the viral social networking power of Facebook and MySpace. Instead, Kickapps now wants to ride on their coattails to engage clients in using their platform as a social network. Kickapps, a white label social networking startup, will now support Facebook Connect and OpenID on KickApps-powered websites.

Clients will have the option to activate the OpenID and 3rd party registrations from their desktop console and then integrate their log-ins and profiles from social networks including Facebook and MySpace. Kickapps will automatically import data from from a client’s Facebook or MySpace profile for free. With Facebook Connect, a client can let members post a note on their Facebook news feed about what they are doing on a KickApps powered site with a link back to the site.

The KickApps platform allows web publishers and marketers to create sites filled with social media applications to better engage audiences through social networking, user-generated content, and widgets. Kickapps’ has shown some success in creating branded social networks, but leveraging the power of the much more popular major social networks is a smart move because it will lower the barriers to joining a Kickapps-powered site.

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Yesterday, word leaked out that white-label social networking startup KickApps raised another round of funding. But the amount reported by PEHub (”over $13 million”), based on an old Reg. D filing at the SEC, wasn’t exactly precise. It wasn’t exactly wrong either.

KickApps CEO Alex Blum confirms to me that the company did indeed raise a C round of $14 million with a new lead investor, North Atlantic Capital. Existing investors Softbank, Spark Prism and Jarl Mohn also participated. KickApps either splits ad inventory with publishers on the pages created on its platform (60 percent to KickAps, 40 percent to publishers) or lets publishers buy out its portion of the ad inventory for $3 to $6 CPMs. Most larger customers choose to control the ad inventory themselves, which suggests that when social networking features are wrapped into a larger site, the ad rates don’t have to be counted in dimes (as they do on much of Facebook and MySpace).

Some examples of branded social networks built on KickApps include fan sites for the San Francisco 49ers, and Gossip Girl, Rachel Ray’s Incredible People, as well as NPR’s get-out-the-vote site and the now-defunct McCainSpace. Some last longer than others. A full 40 percent of its business is now overseas, including a Guinness World Records site and Guia Infantil, the BabyCenter of Spain. All in all, KickApps now powers nearly 50,000 social networks that, according to Blum, collectively attract 10 million people a month and generate 300 million pageviews.

But Blum thinks that page-based metrics are the wrong way to look at audience engagement. Rather, it makes more sense to measure how people interact with a site and with each other at the level of the app, which can also be measured offsite as well when apps get spread virally as widgets. Blum argues:

We are developing a new form of measurement as Omniture becomes irrelevant. Measuring page-based analytics is a commodity. It is given away for free by Google.

Of course, he would say that. But he does have a point.

KickApps is especially appealing to big media companies because it lets them put social features on sites they already control. Last year, Warner Brothers pulled a bunch of its CW TV sites (including Gossip Girl, 90210, America’s Next Top Model, and Smallville) from Ning and took them over to KickApps precisely because of this reason. It was adding pageviews and members to Ning’s total, instead of its own, and it didn’t like that. (Update: Ning CEO Gina Bianchini responds: “That’s not how it works for any of our domain mapped networks.” She says pageviews are accredited to the network creator’s URL and membership data can be exported in a CSV file).

Another part of KickApps’ appeal is that it has a dead-simple WYSISWYG app editor that lets even non-designers drag and drop entire sites or widgets, complete with advertising. It also supports both OpenSocial and Facebook apps, so those can be added as well.

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KickApps, a company that provides on-demand social media applications that enable web publishers to monetize online audiences announced today that it’s trying to make it easier for website owners to add video advertising to their own videos and websites using the KickApps Widget & Video Player Studio.

Using drag-and-drop, KickApps’ clients can add translucent overlay, interstititial, and pre- and post-roll advertising to any of their videos running on KickApps’ video players with the help of a mouse. The company also announced that along with its drag-and-drop feature, it now supports integration with Google AdSense for Video, Scanscout, Adap.tv, and 24/7 Real Media. So far, it doesn’t support DoubleClick’s DART, but the company promised that it will be made available over the next few weeks.

In order to use the KickApps’ Widget and Video Player Studio, web publishers need to buy out ad inventory based on a set CPM rate. In return, the publishers can then place the KickApps advertising modules onto their sites on-the-fly.

The KickApps Widget & Video Player Studio is available now for any publisher that signs up for the service.

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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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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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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.

Ning

Ning (which means “peace” in Chinese, in case you were wondering) currently provides by a wide margin the best platform for setting up fully functional and visually appealing social networks from scratch. While Ning attempts to provide essentially the same out-of-the-box service as GoingOn, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, and ONEsite, none of its competitors can yet match the professionalism of its product.

The company’s superior execution has so far earned it 76,000 hosted networks (although, browse Ning’s list of “popular” networks and one gets the strong sense that the vast majority of these networks were set up by tire kickers and promptly abandoned).

The standard Ning package allows affiliates to build at no cost an ad-supported network with all of the features that they offer. This entails a point-and-click setup process in which an affiliate chooses a theme, tweaks appearances, and loads features such as photos, videos, groups, and blogging. Within minutes, the affiliate has created an impressive, fully-featured (albeit rather cookie-cutter) network that is ready to accept its first batch of members, which can be invited by email or Ning ID.

For most affiliates, the ease in which you can set up a solid network will be the selling point. However, Ning also has offerings for more advanced affiliates that allow networks to partially break out of the standard Ning format. Affiliates can disable ads or run their own ads for $20 per month, and they can mask their networks’ URLs for only $5 per month. Furthermore, they have access to Ning’s comprehensive Developer Documentation and an API for when they desire advanced customization. Effectively, their API allows developers to take the standard Ning network and retool it, whereas KickApps (discussed below) encourages advanced customization by providing developers with a bare foundation on which to build.

While the Ning platform can be made almost entirely invisible by removing the top Ning toolbar and masking the URL, all networks hosted by Ning share the same user base. When a user joins your Ning network as a member, he or she obtains a Ning ID that works with all other Ning networks. On the one hand, this system facilitates the process by which users sign up for more than one network. On the other, it serves as a constant reminder that the network is actually hosted by a white label social networking platform. Many affiliates will not mind this system at all, but others who want to completely brand their community will consider this a detraction.

KickApps

Whereas Ning holds your hand from start to finish as you construct your social network, KickApps is targeted more at web developers (and companies with web developers on staff) who want to incorporate social networking features into their existing websites without going through the hassle of coding and maintaining those features on their own. As such, when you begin to construct your social network with KickApps, you will be presented with a pretty bland, default template that you then must mould to create anything decently attractive. Ning helps you customize your network with premade templates, but KickApps gives developers more immediate control over header and footer code and CSS styling. Consequently, it takes more time and expertise to get a KickApps network looking good, but in the end it may very well look more seamless and professional than any network hosted on Ning.

Other features provided by KickApps emphasize the intention for its social network components to integrate nicely into an existing site. The company allows you to customize your network’s URL for free so users don’t feel as though they are leaving a main site. Also free of charge: unlimited storage and bandwidth for all that multimedia content (video, audio, photos, etc.) you want your users to upload. Furthermore, each network is given its own user base so that members feel as though they are signing up for a particular network, not a platform (as is the case with the Ning’s universal ID system). To top it off, the company is willing to work individually with affiliates to make their platform as invisible as possible (by removing all references to KickApps, etc).

KickApps’s advertising scheme is particularly unique. Whereas other platforms charge a flat rate to turn off the advertising that supports their free service, KickApps follows a pay per performance model in which affiliates who opt to turn off or run their own advertising only pay KickApps in amounts proportional to their networks’ traffic. With the free platform package, all but a single skyscraper area of an affiliate’s network are controlled by KickApps. However, once an affiliate decides that it wants to control advertising it pays roughly $2-5 for every thousand pageviews to its network, with rates decreasing as traffic grows.

KickApps also provides the most robust set of widget creation tools, which is intended to help affiliates promote their networks through viral marketing. The widgets that affiliates create with an easy-to-use control panel display content shared or produced on a particular network and can be embedded on other websites or social networks. These widgets drive traffic to one’s network by channeling anyone who interacts with a widget back to the network from which it comes.

KickApps’s 4,000 networks may pale in comparison to Ning’s 76,000 but the company appears to be gaining traction as it continues to roll out features. The recently released v2.2 of its platform improves the platform’s video and content moderation capabilities and suggests that the company is moving towards providing better tools for quick and easy customization, thereby competing more directly with Ning for the patronage of laymen. Concurrently, KickApps is developing an extensive API (currently in private beta) that should reinforce its primarily role as service providers for web developers.

CrowdVine

CrowdVine may not be pretty or intricate but it’s not meant to be. Until recently a one-man show embodied by Tony Stubblebine, CrowdVine provides the simplest, most basic solution for those looking to set up their own social network.

The main features of CrowdVine are member profiles, blog posts, and public messaging. You won’t find any rich media sharing capabilities, such as photo and video, in the basic package because Tony intended CrowdVine to be all about connecting people and not about sharing their forms of self-expression. As such, the platform has appealed mainly to conference organizers and attendees, alumni (of businesses and schools), intranet users, and professionals.

The lack of control over the look and feel of one’s social network corroborates the idea of CrowdVine as a utility provider. So does the fairly unique feature of having all members respond to network-specific questions, the answers of which become tags that facilitate the browsing of members by criteria. For example, new members to the PodCamp Atlanta network are asked about their interests and expertise, and their answers become linked tags on the homepage of the network that enable visitors to view members, for example, by their interest in “blogging” or expertise in “video production”.

While Tony is not rushing to add features to CrowdVine, he is happy to work with affiliates to add functionality to their networks. The Foo Camp network has taken advantage of the Tony’s accessibility by integrating calendar and wiki support as well as color coding of members. Tony is also willing to work with affiliates to set up custom URLs and deactivate ads (for a fee of course), thereby achieving more of a “white label” result.

GoingOn

Representatives for GoingOn (still in beta) admit that their site is ugly (and, I should add, quite disorganized), but appearances tend to mask the potential of this company’s platform, which is intended to straddle the divide between those of Ning and KickApps. Built on top of Drupal, GoingOn provides easy network setup a la Ning, but the company is also partnering with media companies (with results such as Forbes Office Pranks and the American Superstar Mag Lounge) to integrate social networks into existing websites a la KickApps.

Currently, GoingOn executes neither of these services as well as Ning or KickApps. However, its platform does provide a wider range of features than either of these two companies (unfortunately, most of these features, or “modules”, are currently half-baked). If you demand features that neither Ning nor KickApps currently provides, it may very well be worth dealing with all of the imperfections that come along with GoingOn’s beta status.

There are structural and strategic aspects of GoingOn that make it worth tracking over the coming year. Since it is based on Drupal, the company claims that it can more readily deploy open source software packages on its platform. This translates into even more features over time, which may help it maintain its feature lead on its major competitors. Its Drupal heritage also facilitates the creation of a Drupalesque API, which the company tenatively plans to roll towards the end of the year.

GoingOn, the self-described “network of networks”, maintains a shared user base for its hosted networks. Unlike Ning, however, it explicitly plans to take advantage of this shared authentication system by providing networks within networks. For example, teachers at one point may be able to join a nation-wide network that contains sub-networks for the country’s school districts. The possibility of nesting networks may give GoingOn the edge with hierarchical organizations.

Affiliates can opt for one of five GoingOn network packages, each of which provides progressively more customization capabilities. Most affiliates will probably choose between a Free Network and a Pro Network, of which the latter costs $20 per month but allows affiliates to manage their advertisements. Custom URLs are free of charge for all packages.

CollectiveX

CollectiveX is a borderline white label social network platform. Its questionability arises from its orientation around exclusive groups (”groupsite” being its word for “network”) and from its very narrow range of customization options. Additionally, members of a CollectiveX group cannot friend each other, so it lacks a basic feature of virtually every social network (apparently, it is presumed that everyone within a group knows each other).

However, beyond these idiosyncracies, CollectiveX provides an impressively refined way for people to share information and content within a controlled, social network environment. The main features of a CollectiveX site include a calendar, forum, and file area (for general uploads and photos in particular). These offerings are not extensive, but the mantra “quality over quantity” certainly applies.

Unique to CollectiveX is the ability of a network’s members to list personal objectives and to declare any “key connections” (read: relationships) they have with particular individuals. These features reinforce the feeling that groupsites are meant primarily for business professionals who are looking to network (in the business sense of the word) in addition to collaborating online with associates.

While CollectiveX’s free package is supported by advertisements as with other platforms, the company’s strategy seems to be particularly focused on earning money through selling premium features. For $9 per month, network admins can remove advertising, but apparently there is no way to run your own advertisements. For additional payments of $9 per month, admins can also gain more control over group permissions, enhance network security with 128-bit SSL encryption, and increase storage capacity to 3 gigabytes. For a one-time fee of $99, CollectiveX will “white label” your network, which basically entails just dropping your own graphic into the header and importing members from another user base.

Me.com

Me.com, which runs on top of software called SNAPP, is the MySpace of white label social networking platforms (and I mean that derogatorily). The idea, as with Ning, is to set up a network in a minimal number of steps. However, each of Me.com’s themes is an eyesore and, worse, the organization of elements throughout the default network is horrible. If you like this MySpace approach to user interface design, then you’ll be right at home. I, for one, get a headache just looking at the thing.

Style considerations aside, Me.com provides an abundance of features, although many of them are poorly implemented. The audio and video sections, for example, don’t support file uploads; you actually have to record the media directly into the browser using a webcam or similar device.

The most bizarre feature is the cars section in which you can actually list the cars you own/once owned/want to own/dream about, etc. Criticisms aside, Me.com does integrate a pretty slick chat applet into each network and the same can’t be said for most of the other platforms.

Network packages on Me.com come in three flavors, which are conveniently compared to one another in a features chart. The biggest differences, of course, are between the free, ad-supported package and the other two. For a minimum (!) of $199 per month, affiliates can control advertising, customize their URL, and implement basic site branding (color schemes, logos, etc.).

PeopleAggregator

Broadband Mechanics’ PeopleAggregator is an experiment in building social networks around open standards so that people can easily move between networks, whether or not those networks are run by the same owners or contain the same features. If the social networking world were run the way Broadband Mechanics’ CEO Marc Canter envisions, Facebook users would easily be able to carry their identity (including all the information they owned on Facebook) over to MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. Then any changes to their identities on those networks could be brought back over to Facebook.

As a model for this sort of interoperability, PeopleAggregator (which comes in both hosted and downloadable versions) implements the OpenID authentication system and strives to support all open standard identity schemes. Broadband Mechanics also provides an API that is meant to enable the import and export of data to or from a PeopleAggregator network. As a long run strategy, the company entreats web service providers to embrace open standards that facilitate interfacing between social networks and non-social networks such as Google Calendar, YouTube, and Yahoo Messanger.

Five years from now, we may look back on PeopleAggregator and consider it a pioneering product. However, in its present condition the platform is clunky and unsatisfying. Others seem to agree: the largest network on PeopleAggregator, Poker Players Alliance, with 499 members gave up on PeopleAggregator and moved its operations to an old school, phpBB forum.

PeopleAggregator could be improved in a number of obvious ways. For starters, the company could and should promptly clean up the platform’s landing page, which is littered with nonsensical text that doesn’t exactly create a stellar first impression. More substantially, the company ought to allow for at least some management of advertisements and to permit more control over the structure and styling of networks. Unless you are banking on open standards as the way of the future, there’s not much for you here.

Haystack

Haystack, a Cerado product, is a social networking utility that is even more stripped down than CrowdVine. Networks (or “haystacks”) built on this platform are very simple, both visually and functionally. The main features consist only of profiles and group blogging.

Haystacks are so plain because their intention is fundamentally different from those of most social networks. While we generally think of social networks as ways for people to interact with one another within a network, haystacks are more outwardly focused as they are meant to provide visitors with detailed information about people in a particular organization. According to Christopher Carfi of Cerado, the initial idea for Haystack was to enable organizations, and particularly businesses, to present interactive information about externally-facing individuals (such as those in sales and support).

Like CrowdVine, Haystack makes good use of tagging as a way to find people according to criteria. Members across all hosted haystacks can search for each other by the tags they have assigned to themselves, and there is even a handy Google Maps integration that shows you where the people in your search results are located across the globe.

Recognizing that the default haystack layout may cramp some people’s styles, Cerado provides an API that can be used by developers to take advantage of the haystack data structure and create applications on one’s own sites.

ONEsite

ONEsite, a subsidiary of the hosting company Catalog.com, provides a hybrid social networking/website hosting solution. They allow you to mask your social network’s URL so that it meshes with an existing website, but they won’t offer you their free social networking solution unless you buy a domain with them. In the limited time of this study, we weren’t able to set up a network of our own.

Browsing the showcased networks, however, gives one the sense that ONEsite’s platform is not half bad. Some of the networks (such as the CEO’s Crull Zone) follow a standard, ONEsite template with simple customizations while others (such as iVillage connect) are more fully integrated into existing websites. However, it is unclear whether the more fully customized networks are designed by the ONEsite team under the expensive, $2,500-per-month Enterprise package or created by affiliates themselves with ready-made tools. I suspect that the former is the case.

Regardless of the platform’s quality, ONEsite’s offerings are steeply priced and their user limits are a bit draconian. The free offering only permits 100 users on your network, the $30-per-month offering permits 1,000, and the $200-per-month offering permits 10,000. I suppose no one is really intending to build the next MySpace on this platform, but from a cost point of view, the difference between 100 and 10,000 users for ONEsite is probably near nothing.

If you have created a network with ONEsite, please let us know about your experience with them in the comments.

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KickApps

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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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.