KickApps. White-label social networking, rich media, user-generated content.

Well, it’s been months coming. But KickApps has officially launched. Check out the official press page. TechCrunch also did a nice write-up. From the KickApps homepage:

“KickApps is a hosted platform that allows webmasters to quickly and easily deploy user-generated content and social networking functionality directly on their websites. Our company provides a “white label” solution, with all elements precisely matching a website’s existing look and feel. The KickApps platform is highly customizable, scalable and enterprise-quality.”

“By providing webmasters with a set of sophisticated media management, reporting and administrative tools, KickApps protects websites from pornography, copyrighted material and inappropriate user content that may hurt their brands or offend advertisers. The KickApps platform is a complete content management system and a viral syndication engine for your community (and premium) content.”

As far as I know, it’s one of a very few number of white-label social networking apps. One of KickApps’ more interesting characteristics is their concept of widgets. Widgets are pluggable chunks of code that community members can drop anywhere they want, including in their MySpace profiles. THis allows members to drive traffic back to the community home page. Also, anyone can “steal” these widgets and paste them elsewhere, causing viral growth of these wormholes back to the original site. It’s interesting to think that a few well-placed widgets can grow website traffic in a manner dictated by the network effect.

I’m excited to see how this will play out, as the KickApps platform has the potential to commoditize the social networking and rich media industry by providing a free turnkey solution that website builders can just drop into their HTML, without spending months coding up a software system.

Give it a try, it’s free to sign up as an affiliate with KickApps. Get started here!

(Full disclosure - I am a KickApps employee.)