For the first time in a decade, consumer social is about to turn a new corner. I remember going to my first company hackathon as a Facebook intern, and discovering the secret Messenger soccer game (to unlock it, you had to send your friend an emoji soccer ball, ⚽️, and then long press it). For that hackathon, we remixed the game to create a rocket ship 🚀 Flappy-bird-like game, and it immediately became a hit in our intern groupchat. It never shipped to production to hit the light of day, but that joy of remixing a game stuck with me: it’s the dream of miniapps to create small experiences and then share them with your friends.
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.
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:
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.
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