At Seam, we're building the most customizable social network. Each post on Seam can be anything, thanks to miniapps created by our community. We've already seen fun miniapps like Pixel Art, Dizzy Text, and even a customizable Potato Builder. But there are still countless opportunities to shape the future of online connection. Miniapps are the future of social networks—so what should creators focus on first?

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.