Hey there! I’ll keep this post short and answer the following prompt by Mac:

“What are some of the most promising, non-speculative web3 social apps?”

In my opinion, one answer is: apps that enable users to create, curate, and share their digital identity leveraging onchain assets. I think that apps in this category come from the same lineage as Myspace and Instagram, in that they should let users:

  • express their digital identity
  • let other people interact with it

The primary human drives here are the same: the desire for people to distinguish themselves, gain status, assert an identity as individuals, and connect/belong with people who share similar traits. The difference with previous generations of applications is that people would leverage on-chain assets like NFTs and attestations, instead of just uploading photos to their blog or Instagram profile. In this way, this new identity would be more provable and tangible than it has ever been in the digital realm.

Identity and belonging drive web3 participants behavior

Identity (and tribalism) have always been strong forces shaping crypto as well as the behaviors of its participants, from early Bitcoin and Ethereum forks (BCH/ETC) and corresponding maximalisms to the Solana maxis who all claim to have their own distinct culture and aspirations, even though they all live on the same microscopic crypto island.

In 2021, the digital art then PFP cycle was significantly driven by:

1. a demand from crypto participants to further define their identity and increase their status through the acquisition of meaningful onchain assets

2. artists (like xCopy and Beeple) and creative coders (like Larvalabs) creating and offering new onchain worlds that people could opt into through the acquisition of NFT assets

3. the memetic power of hundreds of people proudly displaying their belonging to these onchain worlds: Punks, apes, penguins and so on...

To be clear it is a behavior that we observer everywhere in modern society, not only in web3.

Web3 hasn't fully enabled this market yet

Thing is the 2021 "identity cycle" had major product limitations. Twitter was never designed for people to display rich digital identities; rather, Twitter profiles are designed and optimized around Twitter’s microblogging use case.

The link-in-bio tools like Linktree are also a hint that there is a desire for people to aggregate a scattered digital identity and regain control over how it is displayed, but the UX that these products imply for the person browsing these profiles is really poor as well. I have to go back and forth, open, and browse different websites, and probably get lost or tired in this process.

So what’s the ideal product for the curation and display digital identities?

Our identities evolve dynamically depending on interests, moods, jobs, and preferences. People get dressed differently depending on if they’re going to the office or an rAAVE party. Maybe these products should simply look to mimic what we’re seeing in real life.

I see a future where products leave space for users to customize what they want to show on each of the apps they use.

It is possible that the Open Graph based technologies we’re seeing emerge with frames (and solana blinks) are part of the answer, where the social products of tomorrow can leave empty building blocks where users can copy and paste their favorite PFP, bio, tokens, NFTs, attestations, social posts, song… Just like they would copy, paste, and post a Frame.

Here is a quick sketch re-using the Twitter example above:

For this reason, I’ve been really interested in the work that the Seam team has been doing, especially in their previous version of the product where one could build Myspace like profile pages from both web2 and web3 assets. On the web2 side of things I look at the 'No Place' profile builder as a sign that this trend is going strong in web2 as well. I’ll be looking to explore this vertical more in the coming months and weeks.

Thank you for reading!