Update: I was contacted by Eric Alterman, founder and CEO of
KickApps , who had a few interesting points to make about my KickApps review. "Some of your comments are right in line with our thinking and will be addressed over our next two releases (October and November). For one thing, we did go live with inadequate help documentation (a video tutorial is natural and would have helped). Also, while immature in some respects, the platform is very stable and unlike anything else on the market right out of the box."
Eric does have a point and as he mentioned to me, as a B to B platform, the back-end areas which currently lack consumer-oriented user-friendliness would benefit enormously from help features such as an online screencast, and that perhaps in a B to B platform the level of user-friendliness I was looking for is not as necessary as it is in more consumer-oriented web apps.
Eric continued to say: "With KickApps any website really can add user-generate content and social networking to their website in just a few minutes, for little or no cost. I believe our 'viral widget' (e.g. 'steal this') functionality is very innovative, and our widget implementation, in general, is fast, easy (requires no engineering work) and highly customizable." The 'steal this' functionality Eric is referring to is indeed pretty cool and in fairness deserved mentioning in the original review — much in the same way YouTube allows users to get code which they can embed in their site to share a speciific video on their website, the 'steal this' functionality allows visitors to a website with KickApps tools to do the same thing not just with a specific video or photo, but actually allows you to take the enitre KickApps application, with content, and embed it on your site.
A free turnkey way of adding web 2.0 social apps to a site holds great promise. Eric, we all look forward to checking out upcoming releases of the app. Good luck!
The original review after the jump.
The promise of a completely customizable suite of web 2.0 apps that anyone can include on their website is really exciting and got me writing about
KickApps.com in a
previous blog post. I wish I had played with KickApps more thoroughly before that post… while KickApps promises such an experience at this time it unfortunately doesn't deliver.
KickApps will allow you to display community uploaded photos and videos uploaded by individual users in a reasonably customized manner. The problem is that as soon as a user signs in to one of their apps on your site they are taken to an individual user page that is not on your site and that looks nothing like your site. Users can use these individual user pages to view, edit and add to their uploaded videos, photos and blog entries — they can even customize their individual user start page with RSS feeds of their choice. This presumably will be the area where most users will be spending their time — of course you would want them to be spending time on your site instead, and this is one of KickApp's biggest problems.
There is no way to integrate these individual user pages into your website's design or functionality in any way except for CSS configuration. If I only want to give users the ability to upload photos and only include that "widget" on my main site, why are users being presented with options to upload videos and blog entries also? And an RSS feed on individual user pages? What's up with that? If I want an RSS feed on my site, I'll have it on my site which is where I want my users to be and not on some third-party admin site.
For this kind of a project to work, the user-friendliness of the back-end area is critical to actually getting people to use kickapps.com on their site — it took me about half an hour just to figure out what was going on. In a web 2.0 world, this is simply unacceptable.
So what would make this kind of tool better? First of all, users don't want individual user pages, they want to be part of larger picture. Sure give users a simple way to add media and edit their own media, but do so from the main apps displayed on the main website — don't force a user to login to a completely new area that is completely detached from the rest of the site both in terms of design and functionality. Just give users that are logged in 2 links that appear on the photo viewer app: upload photo, edit my photos. What's so hard about that?
The bottom line is that KickApps still needs work. I'm not saying that it won't be great one day, but right now it just needs more work.
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August 14th, 2006 at 11:05 am