(import, enrich, export) enriching experiences with farcaster social graph

Farcaster offers a new way to enrich crypto financial experiences, whether it’s buying physical items, digital items like NFTs, sports betting, or engaging in prediction markets. This allows for the integration of standalone web applications into a more socially interactive environment.

Import, Enrich, Export

One of the key advantages of Farcaster is its open API, which stands in contrast to other social platforms that often try to lock users in. With Farcaster, you can always export data with an open API. The ‘server-side’ in Farcaster is a P2P network composed of hubs, and you can always find a hub that will provide the data, or run one yourself. This is the export side.

But the recent introduction of frames also allows for another interesting model, which is open import. You can take an existing web app, transition it into a Frame app, and publish it as a cast (today it is technically limited to the OpenGraph standard, but soon expected to be upgraded to iFrames which are more versatile).

Once you convert web apps into frames, something magical happens – you can enrich them with social data—such as likes, shares, and comments. A piece of the app can be added contextual social data when embedding them in Farcaster. Because the ‘export’ module is always on (no one can shut down the API), this makes for a powerful primitive that allows us to import, enrich, and export back the web app. This process takes a piece of static app with no social context and expands it with social knowledge and interactions.

The Potential of Open Import/Export

The openness of Farcaster’s import/export functionality holds a really big potential. By enabling the enrichment of every application with social layers, Farcaster can make every app a social app. If you can convert it to a frame, you can enrich it. And export it back. This makes everything social.

The Feedback Loop Between Import and Export

Farcaster’s feedback loop mechanism can play a big role in expanding the social graph. The enriched data and user interactions feed back into the main UI, which creates new social experiences and more motivation to import apps as frames and strengthens the Farcaster social graph. As more applications are enriched and more interactions occur, the Farcaster social graph becomes more robust.

I wonder if this import, enrich, export model will be relevant to financial apps, or if it can be extended to many more use cases that are not financial in nature. For example, sharing an album as a frame, enriching it with social data, and exporting it back to the app. Eventually, this process could also work backwards, with the web app providing write capabilities that will feed the Farcaster social graph.

We are very early in exploring this primitive, and I’m excited to see where will it land in a few years from now!