Hi, and welcome to Seam! With the announcement of our seed round of funding today, this the time to introduce ourselves, tell you about what we’re building now, and our vision for the future of social media. Seam allows users to code, design, and curate their perfect social spaces. Ultimately, we create online experiences to foster whimsical relationships with your closest friends.
In order to understand where Seam is going, we first have to start with where we are today. My name is Nick, the founder of Seam, and prior to starting Seam, I spent 5 years at Meta. I’ve always loved building creative tools — from the beginning of my Facebook days on the Groups team in 2016, building the Music sticker on Facebook Stories, to building new social networks on the New Product Experimentation team. Each project was an attempt to help people express themselves online. Through these experiences, I started to notice a pattern about why social media has been the same for the past decade. There are two trends that drive all social media today: the ads based business model, and context collapse on our social graphs.
This led me ask myself the question: what if you & your friends could be the architects of your own online social spaces? Bringing it back to a personal blog and GeoCities era of the internet — except this time, we now have true digital property primitives by storing creative attribution on-chain.
Rather than the next social network being built by the company top down, as it needed to be to support an ads-based business model, we have the opportunity to build it bottom up from contributions from our users, molded from their own community needs and desires of their groupchats.
Seam is a community-developed social media platform to code, design, and curate your perfect social spaces. You can make new pages filled with anything from around the internet, from profiles for yourself or moodboards for your favorite things. 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.
The core of Seam’s online revolution is our mini apps. Mini-apps create the posts you write on your friends walls, and the blocks you use to customize your profile.
Eventually, these mini-apps grow in complexity and become entire social experiences. Mini-apps will initially start by looking like toys: they will be ways to share photos, music, videos and notes, or minigames to play with your friends. But as the community matures and the pool of talented remixers grows, they will increasingly become a force for disruptive innovation.
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 by unlocking the mini-apps made by their friends.
If you’re interested in the technical details, become a block developer today! Mini-apps are React components, written in Javascript. Mini-apps live inside of Seam as plugins, meaning that they don’t need to request API access. This way, there’s no possibility of user data leaking into block developers hands, and y’all can get started building for Seam permissionlessly, without us having to issue API keys.
Learning to code doesn’t have to be a chore. Building new stuff online doesn’t require a degree, it only requires insatiable curiosity and a desire to create. Just like the early internet, when anyone could write a little bit of HTML to spice up their MySpace or Tumblr profile (shoutout to the NeoPets HTML guide!), Seam’s mini-apps aspire to be the place where you write your first line of code.
Social platforms and games have historically been the best examples of inspiring new generations to code. Let’s cut to the fun part: making something that works, being proud of it, and using it with your friends.
Seam is rethinking software design to evolve alongside how people connect, build, and express their identities online. Custom, visual spaces will allow everyone to build social spaces that speak to their unique needs and the needs of their communities.
The core social primitive of the future is not the feed—it’s the group chat. While algorithmic feeds work well for consuming news and influencer content, it doesn’t serve the needs of a social network. Increasingly users are flocking towards private spaces over public spaces for their closest friends. Seam embraces this trend, because groupchats have 3 qualities: