Social Music Search Engine?

Looking for MP3's? Look no further than Project Playlist, (http://www.playlist.com/).

The site, which bills itself as a "social music experiment" and music search engine, is all that and more.

Using the social media / social networking model, the site allows you to build a playlist of tracks from it's vast collection of audio links and assembles them into a freindly, easy to use flash based media player.

You can log in to PlayList.com and add new tracks, re-arrange what you've already got, send email invites to friends, and share your playlist with others.

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KickApps - "white label" social medial software.

The hosted KickApps platform allows developers to create online communities from scratch or integrate social media functionality into existing CMS based sites.

Kickapps is marketed with two pricing models; FREE, and a CPM, (cost per thousand), pageview based pricing structure. Under the free pricing model, Kickapps displays advertising on the communities web pages, but provides a navigation column skyscraper ad space where the community's developer can run Google Adsense or other advertising.

Kickapps prvodes software to easily setup a Web 2.0 community with video, photo, and audio media file sharing.

Community members can interact with the community in a variety of ways including uploading of video and photo media from mobile devices. Each member gets a personal profile pages, (with it's own unique URL), which ties together their media uploads, blogs, forum messages and other aspects of their involvement in the community.

Kickapps is used on many national and international sites to either provide social networking functionality, or is used to create the entire site. Some of the sites include the Guinness' Book of World Records, the Rachel Ray Show, the San Francisco 49-ers Fan Site and National Public Radio (NPR) "Get My Vote" site. The following screen shots are actual KickApps websites, (click links below each one to visit the site).

KickApps powers the Rachek Ray Incredible People social networking site features.

www.rachaelrayshow.com

KickApps powers the Sand Francisco 49ers Faithful Fan Site

www.49ersfaithful.net

KickApps powers National Public Radio (NPR) GetMyVote Political site.

www.npr.org/getmyvote

Setting up a KickApps community was straightforward, fast and took under 5 minutes. You simply create an account, name your community, pick a theme, and go! The online setup tool gives you a temporary URL and a link to the site administration tools as soon as you're done. In less than 2 minutes you receive an email from KickApps with the permanent URL for the site, ("www.kickapps.com/example" if you named your community "example"). The email contains tips and links to help you get your site going.

In addition to the default URL, Kickapps allows you to use your own domain name and will do DNS masking so the site appears as your own. White label refers to the fact that you can re-brand the software as you like and do not have to have advertise that the site is a KickApps community.

I launched the "Affiliate Center", (which is what they call the site's back end management area). and with very little effort quickly customized the default template I had chosen.

I'd recommend KickApps for any organization looking for a hosted solution, although if you are running a commercial website and plan to monetize it with advertising revenue, you may want to look around a bit more as KickApps takes the prime advertising spots on your the site for their own PPC ads. I have not contacted them (yet) regarding the CPM paid pricing model. This story will be updated as ned information is available.

NOTE: Be sure to checkout our Social Media Software Roundup page for details and to compare KickApps to other Web 2.0 application suites.

Common Name: Plaxo

Niche: Personal Social Networking

Slogan: We keep you connected to the people you know and care about.

What they say about themselves: "First, Pulse is not a place to see how many online "friends" you can collect. It’s meant to be a better way for you to stay in touch with the people you actually know and care about — your family, your real-world friends, and the people you know from business."

What I say about plaxo: Ok, now here's something that looks similar to other social networks -- but it is different.

Plaxo does not try to compete for members and promise them they can meet new friends and share everything with the world.

Plaxo is more of an a social networking aggregator. The service, which started as an online address book site includes features so you can keep track of your favorite websites, web services and people.

Members can create a public and a private profile page, then add links and the plaxo "Pulse" feature will track which of your contacts has added new content to their blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Flikr and other social media content sites.

A comprehensive address book makes it easy for you to organize home, work and other contacts information. You can create your own calendar, send eCards and other event based features.

While the site claims to very strongly support users privacy rights, it should be noted that Plaxo recently became a subsidiary of Comcast Interactive Media. If their promotional material is to be believed, they will not use your private data for any type of user profiling or marketing -- but they are owned by a very large commercial online player.

www.plaxo.com

Common Name: Ning

Niche: general purpose - Social Media Software

Slogan: "Create Your Own social Network for Anything"

What they say about themselves: "Marc [Andreessen] and I founded Ning in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create your own social networks for anything. Today Ning powers the largest number of social networks on the Internet." - Gina Bianchini, CEO and co-founder

What I say about Ning: I like it! It's fast and easy to setup a new account and start building your network. The interface is easy to customize and you can add or remove features as you like.

Publish blogs, video and photo galleries, news articles, event calendars, setup chat rooms and groups, and start adding members. Invite and "friending" features and a complete user management system let admins control who and what is on their network.

Ning is a FREE hosted solution, (they monetize the sites by placing advertising on your pages).

Ning offers "Premium Services" which for small fees allow you to remove all Ning branding, use your own domain name, control advertising, or add additional disk space and bandwidth to the 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth they include in the free service.

For about $35/mo you can have a totally white label solution that you can build your own social network on -- and all your members can build out their own spaces on your site.

www.ning.com

Common Name: MySpace

Niche: general social media / social networking website
Slogan: a place for friends.

What they say about themselves: "MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends. "

What I say about Myspace: the best general purpose social networking site, MySpace constantly ranks in the top 2, (competing with FaceBook for #1) , in the Social Media Networking space.

With literally hundreds of millions of users, MySpace has something for everyone.  Meet new friends, share videos, photos, blog, send messages to your friends and their friends.  Members create an account then add photos, blogs, favorites, and invite friends to their network.

Members have very little information on their public page, and can elect to make the rest of their profile public or keep it private where only their approved friends can view the content.  Users can customize their pages extensively which leads to some very good looking ones -- (and some very bad ones).

It's easy to add links to non-Myspace web sites, news feeds, and to install widgets including Open Social, bookmarking and other services.

If you only create one social networking page, MySpace should be on your short list of places to do it.   On the negative side:  using the site can be a little confusing as once your logged in the "home" button takes you to your public page, you need to keep clicking around a lot to find things that aren't already part of your profile.  (Note: MySpace is owned by Fox Media).

www.myspace.com