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Sections Below
Follow China's Lead (sort of)
Farcaster Mini-Apps
Too many legos, let's connect them
Follow China's Lead (sort of)
This past week, there's been some discussion around the idea of mini-apps on Farcaster.
If you played Farmville back in the day or have tried out a Telegram game or have even interacted with a Solana blink, then you've already used a mini-app. Simply put, they're apps within apps.
The general concept of mini-apps are not new at all. In fact, the iFrame (inline frame) HTML tag that makes mini-apps possible was published by Microsoft back in 1997! I went into details on the early history of mini-apps in my Farcaster Frames post from January if you're interested. Note: there's been several names for this kind of functionality (slides, widgets, cards, mini apps, etc.)
As social media started taking off, the web was becoming increasingly dynamic & interactive.
In 2005, Max Levchin launched Slide.com which introduced the concept of web-based widgets that would add a layer of experiences on MySpace and Facebook.
Some of the FB features we know such as "poke" actually started out as slide widgets.
In fact, Max Levchin even mentions this example below in a Q&A back in 2005 - an idea many of us still talk about implementing effectively in social platforms today:
"Connect the widget with a ticket-purchasing service like Fandango through an API. Hook into a user’s account on a movie-rental site like Netflix — but have these things happen within the widget."
And if anything, Western technology has barely scratched the surface of mini-app usage. China's WeChat (everything app) launched what they call mini-programs back in 2017 and they've absolutely exploded in the last 6 years:
4.3 million mini-programs by 2023
500 million DAUs on the minis
In 2021, there was over $250 billion transacted on the minis
Tencent, WeChat's parent company, was able to do this because of their payment service WePay that over 900 million Chinese citizens use. In the West, there are a variety of companies that dominate across different verticals therefore making it difficult to have a single parent app. Facebook for social, PayPal for payments, Amazon for e-commerce, Apple for messaging, etc.
But this is not a bad thing! China obviously has a very different take on data rights, privacy, and centralized entities than us freedom-aligned folks in the west do. There are already anti-trust cases going against these Silicon Valley companies as they stand...imagine if any one of them had 3x or even 10x the data they do today.
However, what if a decentralized solution to an everything app was around the corner 🤔 This would ensure no lock-in in the case that things go downhill.
When I say "around the corner" I mean in the grand scheme of things as in this next 5-10 years of tech. Not 5-10 months!
Farcaster Mini-Apps
Okay, so now going back to Farcaster. Why the sudden buzz?
First, some context. Composer actions on Farcaster are simple tools that quite literally help you compose a cast or frame. For example, the Bountycaster one pops open this form and you can fill it out instead of typing up the bounties from scratch. And the Events one guides you through the process of publishing a new event frame.
But recently Matthew Fox, a developer in the ecosystem, ended up launching a composer action called Flappycaster (yes...remember flappy birds!) that wasn't exactly like the other composer actions. The core premise was to play the game and the only "compose" part was really just sharing your score as a cast.
So, the Merkle team decided to try an experiment where they featured the action as a mini-app in the explore page.
It's technically still the same thing as the rest of the composer actions in the sense that it pops open an iFrame, but the utility is different enough where it warrants a separate name for discussion.
And this opened up a whole new thread of ideas on what else could be possible with the mini-app concept. It's worth noting, frames has constraints that mini-apps don't: 4 buttons, clunky UX, etc. Samuel puts it simply:
"Mini Apps open pandoras box, while Frames set a clear guideline where the user knows what to expect. With Frames directly in the Feed of users, they know how to interact with it and it looks just like the app they already have open.
On the other hand mini apps open a separate webpage that you have built, which means you have to ensure the user feels welcome and has a pleasant experience." - DTech
All of a sudden, it's not that crazy to imagine the range of experiences possible directly on Warpcast through these mini-apps.
For an average Chinese citizen, the majority of e-commerce, food delivery, health tech, etc. all are done on WeChat. For those of us living in the U.S. and Europe, that's an insane concept to think about. We're all used to switching between multiple apps for even the simplest of tasks.
Remember, Warpcast has the core parameters solved: Identity (FID), Payments (Connected Wallet), Network (social graph & feed), and Messaging (Direct Casts).
By providing these as a base layer for any developer to come in and build experiences on top of Warpcast, the "Western WeChat" doesn't seem crazy anymore.
I wanted to share this 🔥 take from Corbin that nails the framing.
Examples & Jam Sesh
Samuel gave me a fun example on the phone. Imagine you're scrolling through the Warpcast feed and you see a frame that says Sam just ordered a McFlurry from McDonalds. And on the frame, there's a button for anyone he follows to get 25% off an order in the next 30 minutes. You go ahead and click on it in within the time frame and a mini app pops up. Next, you pick what you want, type in your address, hit pay & order with USDC, close the modal, and go back to scrolling. 25 minutes later, you get a Warpcast notification saying that your order is on it's way and then another one for when it's delivered.
All in one app...pretty damn cool right?
Okay now let's stop dreaming - we're nowhere near this vision. In fact, it's not even possible to open a mini-app from a frame yet, the deep link functionality still needs to be implemented.
But the point is that now many devs in the Farcaster ecosystem are excited to see this kind of functionality play out.
Think about it...a dev can build a normal react native mobile app as they would and can automatically submit their product as a Farcaster mini-app for distribution purposes. Nothing changes from their end, but discovery, distribution, & viral loops are now possible without affecting the product experience.
Heck, it could even be possible for Woj who is building the Farcaster client Supercast to have users scroll through the Supercast chronological feed within Warpcast itself 😂
Even for creators such as myself, things could dramatically change. Consider the Paragraph frame right now. It's not a fun experience at all - I don't know anyone who enjoys reading the posts in the frame.
But what if I could use the frame as a hook to give readers an idea of what's being covered. If it's interesting, the user can hit "Read" and a mini-app pops up so they can go through the article in a smooth UI. Then, let's say they find one sentence interesting and want to collect it. Within the mini-app, they can highlight and share it immediately on Warpcast with the auto-compose feature. And the creator could get a notification that someone has shared so they can go and interact.
There's even the idea that once the mint period ends, the collector & creator both get a DM from the Paragraph account on the rewards they earned, how many mints, etc.
Heck, let's say I token gate the piece, it's technically possible for the Warpcast team to even trigger the "Pay 100 warps" to read the article. So it's stacking layers: Frame --> Warpcast --> mini-app that blocks article --> Warps Payment --> mini-app to view article.
Frames end up being an effective marketing mechanism for the apps!
I can go on and on with the ideation, but the point is that there's so many different possibilities on how we can think about user engagement with Farcaster adjacent apps.
Too many legos, let's connect them
So why isn't the Merkle team dropping everything and going all in on the mini-app thesis?
Because it needs to be done right! There's too many moving components - so called lego pieces - that are confusing devs & users.
Launching mini-apps without any strategizing on how it fits into the rest of the platform might risk the chance of loosing out on a "frames moment" for Farcaster.
What do I mean by too many pieces? For starters:
Notifications
Direct Casts
Pay users on profile
Cast Actions
Composer Actions
Frames
...and now maybe mini-apps
Right now, all these lego pieces are on the right track but it feels unclear as to what needs to stay, how the legos fit together, and what the flows can look like for fun and productive experiences on Farcaster.
I wasn't on the Farcaster developer call that happened yesterday, but from my understanding Dan & Varun made the point that it's best to figure out what the optimal product flow looks like here before going straight to just dropping another feature.
There's a real chance for the "Farcaster is a decentralized everything app" thesis to play out but for that to happen, it needs to be clear to devs on how they can approach building their products without worrying the experiment will be pulled a month later.
So far, there's just been a single game. But what about different use cases, how do those fit in? To what extent is Warpcast okay adding DC and notification integration to the mini-apps? Can there be some kind of profile action interactivity? What are the downsides of deep linking frames to mini-apps?
My guess is in the next month or so we'll see some of these questions being answered by the Merkle team as well as Farcaster devs that are inspired to submit their own mini-apps. How do all these pieces fit together to work like a Rube Goldberg machine?
And to give credit to Matthew, it's mad impressive that he put this thesis together 4 months ago! I highly recommend following him, Samual, Corbin, and the /mini-app channel to keep up to date.
What kinds of mini-apps would you be excited to see?
If you have any cool ideas, make sure to hit the button below and post them in the TOC channel!
That's all for today's post!
I hope all of you have a great weekend :)
If you have some extra reading time this weekend, make sure to check out my post on how to think about stablecoins (they just hit a market cap all time high this week!)
See you all next Tuesday 🤝
