Kickapps has really improved leaps and bounds since it first launched. Much like Ning, you can create a social network with blogs, photo-sharing and videos in a matter of clicks.

I  remember trying the service out a year ago and I couldn’t even register! The application form didn’t accept my country. I wrote to them and the reply was just very unhelpful. Recently, I went back to it again and I could sign up for the service pretty easily. Most importantly, it delivers on it’s promise - you can set up a social network within minutes.

Playing around with KickApps and Ning always reminds me of the good old days of affiliate marketing. The idea - fill up a form and you immediately get a web store of your own. You don’t have to worry about delivery, logistics and inventory. Just market your affiliate site to friends, family, over the internet, etc.

Affiliate marketing gained some traction and it’s still lurking around today. However, many have realised it’s not a cash cow that’s going to milk a million dollars. Plus, affiliates have to spend quite a lot of time and effort marketing the site. It’s a bit like network marketing. After some initial success, it takes a whole lot more effort to keep it going.

KickApps gives you the same instant results. You can get a site up quickly enough and slap on your logo. You can also use your own domain so it looks like you are the genius behind your own site. I tried it, but I was disappointed that you eventually get back to KickApps URL. Room for improvement there!

What’s neat about Kick Apps:

• sets up in minutes
• allows you to turn on/off moderation
• easy to use back-end interface
• good tutorials available
• you can use your own domain
• export user data in excel/csv

Twittervision is an offspring-cum-mashup of twitter. It allows you to see what everyone in the world is yabbering on about at twitter against a google map.

Although you can’t really do anything on Twittervision except pan and zoom (which is quite painful, really), it’s great fun to watch the world twitter about something or another.  It would have been so much cooler as a screensaver!

Since Twitter is truly a 2.0 concept, there is no comparison to the stuff we did in 1.0. It does, however, bring back memories of “pull and push” discussions. Once upon a time, many internet years ago, there were things like channels that would sit on your desktop and constantly pull news, financial data, etc. to users. Broadcasting to the desktop was something that a few dot coms obsessessed about. We were still at IE 4.0 and Netscape was still a serious contender in the browser wars.

All that is gone now, although some of it is re-emerging. Vista’s desktop widgets serve essentially the same function as IE 4.0 Channels and Active Desktop. It’s just a slicker way of doing things.

What twitter and its offsprings have shown is that the desktop is just half the story these days. Twitter works with SMS, RSS, web and instant messaging. How did they get here? My take is they focused on thinking in terms of messaging rather than applications.

In web 1.0, we had MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Trillian, etc. Brainstorms were always focused on “creating another application” that works just as well and better. And ultimately finance would say “Is there room for another instant messenger?”

Twitter has dug much deeper. Kudos to that.

p.s. I don’t twitter. In fact, I couldn’t understand why it was such a craze. But now I know better

Dabbledb.com is a very interesting application. It’s like plugging in the power of databases into your spreadsheet.

The idea is simply this: Got a spreadsheet? Upload it! Dabbledb.com will transform it into an intelligent database. Dabbledb will make relational databases out of your data. After that, you can easily create look ups, filters, views, etc. Date-based information goes into a calendar too. All without you having to figure out how it works.

For those of us who work on spreadsheets a lot, it’s a dream come true. In the early nineties, most of us still relied heavily on importing Excel spreadsheets into Access to create relational data quickly. Then by using Access reports, we were able to get different views of the same data out to people.

There were always attempts to “duplicate” the power of Microsoft Access on the internet, even in the days when we were just using Perl scripts with flat files. ASP gave Microsoft shophouses a new lease of life on the internet. And soon, we began to see web applications featuring spreadsheets you can import and create relational databases out of. Many of these applications were part of intranets (intranets.com).

When mySQL and php emerged, more attempts were made. I have tried quite a few (their names escape me now) based on the same idea - create relational databases easily. None of them really grew on me. I think the problem is that they were built too much like Access. “Create a record”, “Delete a Record”, “Add a Record”, etc.

Dabbledb.com, on the other hand, has not taken the Access-approach. Instead, the company has embraced the ease of the spreadsheets. The result is a very intuitive application.

What’s neat

• Automatically creates tables for you
• Intelligent moving of records from one table to another
• Define one relationship and all the records are linked
• Very intuitive

If you haven’t tried Google Analytics, you should. It really makes you wonder why you should ever pay for tracking tools. Although Google Analytics isn’t a sexy 2.0 application, I felt that I should definitely include it in my list. For the past week, I have been testing it rigorously. For a tool that is free, it gives you so much, so intuitively.

In web 1.0, we had lots of analytical tools as well. Many were written in perl (does anyone still use perl?). To generate your statistics, you ran a perl script that would trawl through web logs and generate some nice looking statistics. You had to know programming (some level) to configure your perl scripts.

Then came WebTrends. WebTrends was the de facto application. The Enterprise edition had all these fancy things you could do to try and understand your visitors better. The company I worked for then, bought into it, hook-line-sinker.

But that wasn’t even enough! We needed to track conversion rates. We wanted to know “clickstreams” (i.e. how users navigated from page to page), so we acquired another application to do just that.

Both were installed for a hundreds of thousands onto our servers.

With Google Analytics, anyone can get a very impressive set of web statistics and conversion rates just by cutting and pasting some Google code into their websites. It’s a no brainer. Yes, I know. Because it’s javascript based, there are shortcomings and it can never be as accurate as the stuff you generate from your own logs.

But everyone knows, in today’s day and age, we really have very little time to meticulously comb through our own logs for insights. If you are not too fussed about exacting numbers, Google Analytics does the job just fine.

Google Analytics gives you the usual:

• pageviews
• unique visitors/return visitors
• exit pages/entry pages
• top content
• browser info
• geographical location of visitors
• referrers
• keywords

PLUS the following really neat features

• Conversion (whether users get to “thank you page”)
• Depth of content (how deep does each user go)
• Navigation path

Cyworld is Korea’s leading social networking website. While many English social networking sites are struggling with how to make revenue, Cyworld is churning $300,000 a day.

Cyworld is focused. The site is targetted at teens and 20-somethings - people who have time to create networks, homepages and 3-D virtual rooms. Users can buy virtual items to decorate their 3-D rooms. A staggering 25% of the Korean population have an account with Cyworld. Cyworld is now in Japan, China, Taiwan and USA.

In web 1.0, we had Geocities. That was the site to create your personal homepage. You could even create/join neighbourhoods (e.g. Silicon Valley). In 1997, it was the 5th most popular site on the internet.

Geocities rise to fame ended abruptly when the dot com bubble burst and Yahoo! bought over Geocities. Many users abandoned the site and the premium features didn’t gain any traction.

Cyworld is everything that Geocities couldn’t become.

Neat Stuff

• Create your own 3-D room in pixel art
• Create a pixel art avatar of yourself
• Fill your 3-D room with virtual items
• Slick and cute interface
• Photos, videos, journal, sketchbook, file storage, etc. all integrated
• Add friends as “neighbours”