Kiwee is set to launch their Facebook Postcards application today. They specialize in social expressions content, and they aim to improve the space by providing better content, thereby enabling users to "make the content their own."
Kiwee integrates at several points in the online social space, not just at Facebook, with their new application. They offer postcards and graphics designed specifically for use with MySpace (and, let me add, do not bear resemblence to the typical trailer park style glitter graphics you tend to see a lot of on MySpace, either). They also offer emoticons, winks and display graphics that all integrate directly into AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger.
I know I'm starting to lose you here - there are a million and one companies out there that have risen up to fill the need for teenagers to load down their MySpace profiles with extraneous graphics. What makes this so interesting? A couple of things, actually. For one, their sheer size shows that they're a dominant player in the market; they've over 470,000 registered users, and most of them appear to be extremely active (there have been around 461 million IM graphics downloaded by the system). In addition to this, they're also a subsidiary of the 101 year old American Greetings.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jason Jhonson earlier this week, their VP of Marketing. Unfortunately, Gizmo took a dump on the audio recording, but lucky for us my memory hasn't quite reached old man status, and I can summarize and comment on what we talked about without auditory playback.We spoke quite a bit about the growth and monetization of the system. A lot of it comes from the toolbar that's installed when the IM widgets are installed, which they don't use for piggybacking spy-ware and ad-ware, but for funneling search through MS's LiveSearch (a solid business model that Mozilla uses to great success with FireFox).
The most interesting topics we touched on was the research and data they as an organization collect on the backend regarding usage and user desires. With user numbers as enormous as theirs, they're uniquely positioned to get first looks at overall trends, such as the impact of social networking on the usage of Instant Messaging, and the types of instant messages that are typically sent with their avatars (something like 83% of IMs are some variation on "Hi there").
An interesting bit they're noticing is that the advent of social networking as a primary communications method hasn't had a significant negative impact IM communication - the types of conversations that the users have across the networks vary significantly from the types of communication that take place on IM.
We talked about APML, and whether they at Kiwee were using it to gather and harness user data, since a lot of their work revolves around heavy research as to what the users are trending towards. Jason said that they hadn't yet gotten into it, but it was something they'd likely be looking into soon.
