Note: These ideas are not meant to be prescriptive, and the best ideas will come from you, not this list. We’re all building the future of creative expression together!

Niche Hobbies & Fandoms

Pinterest has more than 500 million monthly active users, yet they're limited to collecting existing internet images to their boards. How might we make it easier to create the images for each niche hobby and fandom?

Consider Magic: The Gathering, a card game with more than 700,000 followers on its subreddit. Of those, 78,000 have broken off and created their own subreddit, /r/custommagic, which is the home for custom cards for the game. In our previous Seam Summer Hackathon, the winner for Best Quality was a Magic Card generator, which allows users to create their own cards. This tool allows anyone with a card idea to contribute by simply uploading an image and text, eliminating the need for Photoshop skills. Better yet, users can create cards directly in Seam and instantly post them to their collections. In this vein, there are so many other opportunities for custom templated image creation miniapps—Pokemon, Yugioh—but even beyond into character creators, like our Wardrobe miniapp.

Going further, miniapps that allow collecting the real world is another exciting area. Miniapps using specialized models to recognize and categorize real-world objects could make Seam a hub for various hobbies. Vivino, for instance, lets wine enthusiasts scan and identify wine bottles. With a community of 50 million users who collect and rate wines, it's become a digital wine journal. A miniapp that scans a bottle of wine to identify it, and then allows the collection and posting of it is technically challenging but would make a great experience. Similarly, the Merlin bird app, downloaded over 12 million times, helps birdwatchers track their bird sightings. Each one of these requires specific expertise that should be brought onto the Seam platform.

Rather than having these interests strewn all over the internet, these niche Seam miniapps can stitch all your interests together into one spot, while lowering the barrier to creation.

Showcase your art & creations: New Ways to Tell Stories

Seam can reinvent image sharing online, as we are no longer constrained to Instagram square boxes. What might be the best way to tell your story online? Does it look more like a flipbook, a scrollable webcomic, or a before/after slider? When we expand the mediums from which people can share, we give them the power to tell the stories they want to tell.

When I was at Facebook, I was on the Creative Formats team, where we developed new tools to create content to share. We mostly focused on new camera modes, based on the success of Boomerang. But there are so many possible new camera modes that never saw the light of day:

• Playing with time: slo-mo, timelapse, and variable speed video capture

• Playing with perspective: FrontBack, capturing the front and back camera at the same time

• Playing with interaction: Could parts of the image be revealed by user interaction in the feed?

Another way to approach Seam miniapps and their ability to tell new stories is by the type of creator. Different artists use different mediums, and it doesn’t make sense that they’d all be forced into sharing a flat image.

• What might be the best way for a photographer to show off their work?

• A 3d artist? You could embed 3d models directly into the feed.

• How could we make reading long form essays or stories in the feed? A presentation more like an e-book that opens full screen when you tap into it?

A great example is the Layered Image miniapp, the winner of Best Design in our Summer Hackathon.

Closing Thoughts & Advice

The future of social networks aren’t going to be built by walled gardens; they are going to be created by all of us. After all, crowdsourced content always beats centralized content. Get started creating miniapps by reading Seam’s developer documentation at docs.getseam.xyz.

The Limitations of Online Attribution Systems

In traditional online platforms, whether it's coding on GitHub, posting videos on YouTube, or sharing photos on social media, attribution is typically tied to a single account. The person who uploads the content is the one who receives credit, recognition, and in some cases, monetary rewards. For example, on YouTube, the channel owner collects all ad revenue from videos posted. Similarly, on music platforms, the artist account that uploads the song is the one paid for that content.

While this system has worked to a certain extent, it doesn't accurately represent the collective nature of most creative processes. Creativity thrives in a collaborative environment. When individuals come together, share ideas, and build on each other's work, the result is often far greater than the sum of its parts. This collaborative spirit is evident in numerous fields—especially in software development, where designers, developers, and testers work together to create apps.

Despite the collaborative nature of creativity, the current systems of attribution on the internet remain largely individualistic. This misalignment between the reality of the creative process and the systems designed to attribute credit has led to a situation where many contributors remain unrecognized for their work. Designers, ideators, and other non-developer roles are particularly overlooked, even though their contributions are crucial to the success of any project.

Introducing Point Splits on Seam: A New Era of Creative Attribution

At Seam, we believe in the power of collaboration and the importance of recognizing all contributors to a creative project. That’s why we are thrilled to announce the introduction of point splits on our platform. This new feature is designed to more accurately reflect the collective effort involved in creating a good miniapp.

How Point Splits Work

Previously, when a miniapp was unlocked on Seam, the creator received 30 Seam points. Traditionally, these points would go solely to the developer who wrote the code. However, with the introduction of point splits, this reward can now be divided among multiple contributors based on their involvement in the project. The split can be completely controlled by the creators in code. To learn more, read about Adding Teammates in the Seam developer docs.

createdBy: [{username: "jamesburet", split: 0.5}, {username: "rocco", split: 0.5}]

Point splits allow for programmatic division of rewards, ensuring that everyone who contributed to the creation of a miniapp receives their fair share of recognition and reward. Whether you’re a designer who made the app visually appealing, a developer who brought the idea to life, or even the person who came up with the initial concept, point splits ensure that your contribution is valued.

Expanding the Scope of Collaboration

Point splits open up new possibilities for collaboration on Seam. By making it easier to distribute rewards among all contributors, we’re encouraging a more open and collaborative creative process. For instance, if you have a great idea but don’t know how to code yet, you can share your idea on Seam, where others can pick it up and carry it further. Designers can then take your concept and transform it into finalized mocks, from which developers can turn it into a functional miniapp in the Seam iOS app.

This approach lowers the barriers to entry for creative projects, allowing more people to participate in the process, regardless of their technical skills. As a result, we expect to see a surge in creativity and innovation on Seam, as more ideas that would have otherwise remained undeveloped are brought to life through collaboration.

The Future of Creative Collaboration on the Internet

The introduction of point splits on Seam is just the beginning of our efforts to foster a more collaborative and inclusive internet. We envision a future where creativity is no longer constrained by the limitations of traditional attribution systems. Instead, we see a world where anyone can contribute to a project, and everyone involved is recognized and rewarded for their efforts.

This shift towards a more collaborative internet has the potential to unlock new levels of creativity and innovation. By enabling people to build on each other's work and rewarding them for their contributions, we can create a thriving ecosystem of creators who are motivated to share their ideas and collaborate freely.

Conclusion: Remix the Internet

As we move forward, Seam will continue to explore new ways to enhance collaboration and ensure that all contributors receive the recognition they deserve. Point splits are a significant step in this direction, and we are excited to see how this feature will empower creators on our platform.

This summer Seam is sponsoring a miniapp hackathon challenge to see who can build the best miniapps! Compete to win prizes -- if you know how to code or are just learning React, this is a great opportunity. As always, Seam miniapps have the bonuses of:

• Submitted miniapps can go live to our community of more than 20k users in the web app at seam.so and also live on the iOS appstore!

• All miniapp code is open source, so you can remix and learn from examples.

• You earn Seam Points when other users unlock your miniapps.

Get Started

Before creating a miniapp, you should join Seam! Creating a Seam account allows you to claim a username and profile that will be used as the author of the miniapp. More importantly though, it allows you to join a community of other builders, designers, and curators all building the future of social networking together.

Either join on web at seam.so, or download our iOS app from the Apple appstore.

Start coding at docs.getseam.xyz, our step-by-step guide to get you started. Miniapps are small React components written in Typescript. If you have written JavaScript before, this will be a fun challenge. Even if you are new to front-end development, it is a good place to learn. Simple miniapps can take only 15 minutes to create, and you can make them as complex as you want.

Requirements

What to Build

The goal for this miniapp challenge is to create new, fun ways to share with your friends on Seam.

Miniapps make posts. Users play with miniapps to create new art, music, or games, which then can be experienced by your friends. Miniapps live inside Seam, the super app, which acts as a constant contact book and platform for the feeds and groupchats that miniapps live inside of. Miniapps are creative tools that render their end product to a feed.

A miniapp fundamentally has two steps. They start with the singleplayer mode, where someone enters their data, plays the game, or interacts with the app. The second mode is how it shows up in a feed, which is a typically the finished product of the creative process: the finished song, GIF, or highscore. Some quick examples:

• Artistic miniapps first allow artists to draw on a canvas, and then post their watercolor. Yes, Microsoft Paint is basically a miniapp.

• Commerce miniapps first allow a seller to decide what to sell and how to make the post look, and then allows users to buy with one tap.

• Game miniapps first allow friends to play the game, and then allows them to compete by posting their highscores.

• Utility miniapps take the most arcane 3D image filetypes, and then render them properly in the feed.

The options for miniapps are endless — see the examples that already exist on seam.so.

How to Submit

To be considered a submission for the challenge, the code for the miniapp must be submitted as a Pull Request in the Github repository for Seam’s miniapps by the end of the submission period.

Additionally, submissions are encouraged on Devpost to add more detail as well as to be added to the project gallery.

For a successful submission, the miniapp should:

• Compile and run within the Seam miniapp builder environment without errors or crashes

• Run performantly without excessive lagging or glitching

• Allow a user to make a post and successfully render in the feed

We’re launching Seam Points for our miniapp marketplace because of our commitment to recognize and reward developers for their creative efforts. As a miniapp developer, you're not just a contributor; you become a crucial part of building the first community developed social platform.

Unlocking miniapps benefits not just the developers but also the users. It encourages a proliferation of unique miniapps in our marketplace, creating new ways to share and create music, art, and games. Every time users unlock a miniapp, they're directly supporting the developers, fostering a sense of community and shared success.

We believe this step symbolizes a significant advancement in Seam’s journey. It's not just about enriching the Seam platform with a range of diverse miniapps; it's about pioneering a new system for collaborative creation online, and a new non-ad business model for social networks.

Unlocking Miniapps

• To unlock a miniapp, you send 30 Seam Points to the creator of the miniapp. That’s how we reward the people who make fun new miniapps!

• All core miniapps made by @seam will be unlocked for free, forever.

• Once miniapps are unlocked, you can use them to create posts on Seam.

Earning Seam Points

• Signing up to Seam earns you 100 Seam Points to choose your starter miniapp. If you’re an original user of Seam, we’re adding an 100SP welcome back bonus.

• Users earn more Seam Points by completing daily miniapp challenges.

• We’re experimenting with new ways to earn and spend Seam Points, so stay tuned :)

Creating Miniapps

• Build a new miniapp by reading our docs at docs.getseam.xyz and making a pull request to our open-source miniapp repository.

FAQ

• Will Seam Points eventually be redeemable for real money? Will they be onchain?

  • Yes. We’re exploring and researching methods for the fairest way to exchange Seam Points.

• Does Seam take a cut of transactions to unlock miniapps?

  • Initially no, currently all proceeds flow to the creators of the miniapps to bootstrap the miniapp marketplace. However, as Seam grows, we’ll introduce a small transaction fee to support the development of the superapp.

• Why use Seam Points and not traditional currencies?

  • Using Seam Points allows us to experiment with new coordination models online, like awarding points for fixing bugs, suggesting miniapps, and collectively building the app together. More on this soon.

Seam is a community-developed social platform to create and discover open-source miniapps. It provides a platform for online creatives to showcase their work, curate inspiration, and collaborate with peers.

While Messenger wasn’t about to open itself up to user created miniapps in my summer of 2016, the conditions are finally right to usher in the next era of social. The confluence of AI (making it easier to code) and crypto (making new monetization marketplace models possible) is breathing new life into a space that hasn’t seen a long-lasting social app since TikTok launched in September 2016. I believe the shift will be exemplified in the next social primitive: the miniapp.

Miniapps are the New Social Primitive

We’ve had the social app for each era of media; the eras being text, photos, then video. The next era is the era of miniapps. We’ve been able to share text, photos, and then videos with our friends for a decade — next, we’ll build into platforms to craft our own post types. User generated apps are already winning in gaming (Roblox), now they’re coming to social.

What are miniapps and what do they do allow you to do?

Miniapps make posts. Users play with miniapps to create new art, music, or games, which then can be experienced by your friends. Miniapps live inside a super app, which acts as a constant contact book and platform for the feeds and groupchats that miniapps live inside of. Miniapps are creative tools that render their end product to a feed.

A miniapp fundamentally has two steps. They start with the singleplayer mode, where someone enters their data, plays the game, or interacts with the app. The second mode is how it shows up in a feed, which is a typically the finished product of the creative process: the finished song, GIF, or highscore. Some quick examples:

• Artistic miniapps first allow artists to draw on a canvas, and then post their watercolor. Yes, Microsoft Paint is basically a miniapp.

• Commerce miniapps first allow a seller to decide what to sell and how to make the post look, and then allows users to buy with one tap.

• Game miniapps first allow friends to play the game, and then allows them to compete by posting their highscores.

• Utility miniapps take the most arcane 3D image filetypes, and then render them properly in the feed.

Miniapps empower everyone to be Josh Wardle, the guy who created Wordle. He built a word game for his partner, and managed to bring a daily spark of joy into millions of people’s lives by leveraging social feeds for the ubiquitous pass/fail emoji blocks. For a moment in time, Wordle exemplified the promise of a fun, open internet. From that spark spawned a universe of remixes: Worldle, a game for guessing the outline of a country, Heardle, a game for guessing the music, and the list goes on. It was a whimsical time for discovering tiny, new games. Yet there was no central hub for these essentially miniapps. A social platform powered by miniapps has all the memetic potential of inspiring the next Wordle creators.

Why Miniapps Win

Miniapps move the agency of innovation to the end user, and therefore to individual communities. When I worked at Facebook, we did research trips, like the time I went to Indonesia in 2018 to study if TikTok was going to breakthrough to the United States. We used these learnings to power our Creative Tools team — the ones responsible for building new ways to share photos & videos, the most popular one being Boomerang. We were often just guessing at what users wanted out of their social sharing experiences, and validating our hunches with data gathered from releasing the feature to 1% of the population.

But ultimately, if a photographer wants to show off their photos in a particular way, why is a larger company the one to tell them how it’s going to show up in a little box? If a 3D artist wants to have their object spin in space, they should have the ability to make it happen. Social platforms that embrace miniapps as their feed post primitive will outcompete traditional social platforms, because they will innovate so much faster by incorporating talent from the community. Just like how crowdsourced YouTube videos have started to supplant Netflix watch time, so too will crowdsourced miniapps beat static post types on Instagram. Crowdsourced content always beats centralized content.

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” — Joy’s Law

The medium is no longer the message. When we hang out with our friends online, it’s the content of what we’re talking about, not the medium, that matters. A group chat makes this easy: we drop voice notes next to photo memes next to videos we took of the squad trip. Yet outside of heavily walled gardens like iMessage apps, there’s no way for individuals to build new experiences inside of these group chats. We download new apps to try new types of sharing with our friends, but the process of populating a new social graph is cumbersome.

Empowering individuals and communities to quickly build for their own usecases sparks more innovation than constraining ideation to company insiders.

Miniapps are Memetic

Miniapps are inherently viral. What Tiktok did for videos, miniapps will do to social feeds. When your friend creates a post using a miniapp, you’ll be able to immediately do so as well for instant mimicry, spreading it to your own group of friends. In the Worldle example, you’d be able to immediately go from the score post directly into playing the game yourself. This turbocharges growth and discovery for new miniapps, making it a desirable place for miniapp developers looking for distribution, and consumers looking for new experiences.

Miniapps will naturally explode in popularity and then fade quickly, but that’s okay and intentional: the building blocks for the next viral miniapp will be open source and ready to be remixed. Like how brush fires in forests allow for new plant growth, miniapps will blaze into and out of popularity with a constant set of friends underneath.

The miniapp marketplace has a two sided network effect: as the marketplace of miniapps grows, the super app solves more problems for users, making them more likely to stay.

Miniapps are fast to make

Speeding the innovation process along is that miniapps are faster to build than entire social apps. Rather than becoming a full software engineer, building a backend database, and figuring out authentication flows, miniapps focus on the frontend of the experience (ie, sharing photos in a novel way). All the lower levels of the stack, the database, authentication, user session tokens, are handled by the super app. Developers create these miniapps like software Legos: piecing together components into fun new ways to connect. This means it’s much easier to learn to code a miniapp. At Seam, we chose to use Javascript and React components, which already power most of the web, making it easy for anyone with the foundations of coding to contribute.

Miniapps lower the barrier of entry required to create new software, and in turn, open it up to an entirely new demographic of creators. Just like the early internet had folks experimenting changing the code on their MySpace profiles, Geocities sites, and even their Neopets stores, miniapps are an invitation to non-coders to learn how to manipulate software for the first time. Even better, one person’s work can be the springboard for someone else — standing on the shoulders of giants.

Compounding this trend is that AI is making coding easier overall. Code can now be generated from natural language, and if there is a corpus of existing miniapps, AI can even write the code in the required style and format. Miniapps will become the AI killer usecase: if software is eating the world, we’re making it possible for everyone to feast.

Miniapps: The Future Creative Renaissance

So, what are the first miniapps going to be? Like the advent of all newly disruptive technology, the first era will be one of skeuomorphism: miniapps that copy the features of existing social apps. At the beginning, most of these miniapps will “feel like toys”: I’m imaging ephemeral photo miniapps, like Snapchat, meme creation miniapps, like Mematic, or daily word games, like NYT Connections. After reading this article, you’ll start seeing entire existing social apps as miniapps waiting to be built.

Further down the line, people will iterate on and remix miniapps such that entirely new ways of creating, socializing, and sharing come to life. Inevitably, as there was an Uber for the mobile era, a new app that harnessed the full capability of the new technology to build a huge business, there will be a miniapp that fully leverages the capabilities of living in a social feed.

At Seam, we’re building the first community developed social network, powered by miniapps. We already have our miniapp builder live, and our crowdsourced list of ideas for miniapps exists as a repository to record everyone’s creativity.

The future is bright with the Cambrian explosion of creativity on the horizon because Miniapps are ushering a new renaissance of online expression. Join us!

Round led by 1kx with participation from Seed Club Ventures, Sfermion, F7 Ventures, and more

Dec. 11, 2023: Seam, a web3 social platform enabling users to code, design, and curate their perfect social spaces online, today announced the close of its $2.5 million seed raise. The round was led by 1kx, with participation from Seed Club Ventures, Sfermion, F7 Ventures, Social Graph Ventures, and other key angels.

Founded in 2022 by former Meta engineer Nick Confrey, the Seam platform allows users to create custom profiles, add close friends, and share life updates. To do so, Seam introduces the mini-app, empowering users to drag and drop blocks, like gifs, music, and even embedded websites, to create their profiles. All mini-apps are open-source software, allowing anyone to learn to code and remix examples, and then launch new mini-apps to their friends and the world.

Seam aims to bring back a user-owned era of the Internet, focused on whimsical and zany user expression, rather than impersonal newsfeeds. By using mini-apps to drop content into curated social spaces and web pages, Seam is making social media personal again. Seam is for close friends and communities, rather than building for influencers, amassing followers, or portable social graphs.

In addition, Seam’s mini-apps pioneer a new business model for social media. Rather than making money by selling advertising and collecting user data, Seam hosts a marketplace of user-created mini-apps, themes, and templates. Users earn Seam Points and then spend them on profile customizations like unlocking the mini-apps made by their friends.

“By changing the business model of social media from advertising, which is so prevalent today, to a user-owned and generated marketplace, we switch our incentive towards empowering people to create more interesting and expressive experiences. Finally, users can remix the internet, causing Seam to become the most customizable social network,” said Nick Confrey, Co-Founder and CEO of Seam Social.

"The internet originally was cozy, intimate, and most importantly, weird, personal, and interesting,” said pet3rpan, partner at 1kx. “The banner advertising model reduces the places we spend time on into homogenous and mechanical worlds that optimize for ad clicks rather than what makes the internet feel like magic. We believe that Seam has what it takes to be a new home for that energy, and we're excited to be backing them on this journey."

Seam initially appeals to gamers, who can customize their profile to showcase their online personalities. In a partnership with Pixels, a top web3 game, Seam profiles are built directly into the game, allowing users to easily add friends and show off their relevant digital assets.

Seam Social will use the funding to build its marketplace, attract developers to make new mini-apps, launch the mobile app, and expand their team as it continues on the mission to create customizable and user-owned social media. Seam believes that the future of social apps will be remixable, and that users will remix the photos, music, and drawing mini-apps to create a new wave of creative ways to stay in touch.

Users can create their profile now at seam.so and developers can launch new mini-apps using Seam’s Block SDK, and easily port existing open-source code into Seam.

About Seam Social:

Seam Social creates online experiences to foster whimsical relationships with your closest friends. Using web3 technology, the Seam platform enables users to code, design, and curate their perfect social spaces online and to earn rewards for their creations from the community. By removing the need for ads and data collection and aligning incentives between the platform and users, Seam is pioneering a new business model for social media.

For inquiries, please contact hello@getseam.xyz.