Revelation of friend.tech: How to find popular Web3 social applications?
Original author: Cj_Blockchain (@nanbeiblock）
Preface
Recently, many people are discussing whether the popularity of Friend-Tech is sustainable. But in my opinion, whether the success of Friend-Tech (hereinafter referred to as FT) is sustainable or not is not critical. The key is that the popularity of FT itself is very meaningful. The explosion of the FT was to Social-Fi what the death of Gol D. Roger was to the Age of Discovery. Even if FT fell like a meteor like its predecessors, it may have opened the door to the Social-Fi era. Since the big era is about to begin, this article attempts to find the factors behind the explosion of Friend-Tech and the success factors of popular applications, so that we can seize the opportunity in the future era of application explosion.
Preface 2
The broad Social-Fi we mentioned today, I personally divide it into two subcategories:
The first category is protocol-based social applications: including Lens, Farcaster, Cyberconncet, Damus, etc. The goal of this type of applications is to revolutionize centralized social networking. The slogans are Twitter killer and WeChat killer. Build a Web3 social network from scratch.
The second category is Ponzi+ applications: for many gamefi and socialfi, what the project team wants to do is not game and social at all. They actually want to build a Ponzi, and then put a layer of skin on Ponzi. Game and social are the carriers of their Ponzi. Taking social networking as an example, this type of application is more based on reshaping existing social relationships and adding to existing traffic platforms. Then, after attracting enough users through Ponzi, it will gradually transform (or it may be that Ponzi bursts and dies directly).
Blockchain fundamentalists will like the first category of applications very much, but I think it is difficult for the first category of applications to develop given the current user volume and infrastructure level. This is just like if WeChat appeared in 2000, without the popularization of 4G network and the wave of mobile Internet, there is a high probability that it would not be able to compete with QQ.
So today we mainly discuss the second category.
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To judge whether a Web3 social application has the potential to become popular, I think there are three main points to look at:
Whether the original social resources are retained as much as possible
Whether it is possible to divert traffic from a large flow pool
Is there sufficient transmission effect mechanism?
1. Whether to retain the original social resources as much as possible
When looking at a new Social-Fi product, especially the second category mentioned above, you must see whether it retains the users original social resources as much as possible, which includes the users original reputation, social network, etc. Relationships etc. In essence, it is still necessary to reduce the migration cost of users.
Just like when we use web2 products today, it is the same reason that we will ask you to synchronize your address book. Helping users retain social resources is not only for the users, but also helps the project shorten the cold start time as much as possible.
One thing that makes FT successful is that FT retains users original social resources as much as possible. FT does not let users create a new account on FT, but migrates the users Twitter account. The users Twitter The name avatar is the name avatar of FT.
The disadvantage is that FT has not migrated the relationship between following and being followed on Twitter.
In the migration of FT, users retained their reputation and personal brand on Twitter, but lost social relationships. But this is better than most of its peers.
What FT does, aside from FOMO investment and other factors, is essentially people’s desire to have normal social relationships with idols, media figures, and KOLs in a quasi-social relationship network.
In the parasocial relationship network (*Parasocial* Relationship), the real key is the personal brand and image of the KOLs. In the conversion of this relationship, it is necessary to retain the key nodes in the original network. The advantage of this is that users no longer need to work hard to reshape their personal brand after switching social scenes. Users relationship networks can be quickly established through these key nodes.
The smallest account unit is preferably a social account rather than a wallet
In many current web3 social products, the smallest account unit is a wallet. The wallet represents a personal identity, and then users use the wallet to create new accounts and accumulate social resources. This didnt seem to be a problem during the period when DEFI was emerging, because the migration cost of assets was much lower than the migration cost of social resources.
However, in social scenarios, using wallets as the smallest account unit is not the optimal solution. Using wallets as a link means that users will give up all their accumulated original social resources. Even if there are domain name systems such as ENS and Lens handle, their The social resources it carries are also far inferior to those of Twitter accounts. Therefore, a more suitable way is to use social accounts to bind wallets, rather than using wallets as the main body to establish social relationships.
This actually involves the concept of DID. On web3 we all advocate for a unique soul-bound decentralized identity. This DID can both manage our identity and become an entrance or key for us to use other applications. In the above, to a certain extent, the Twitter account is our DID, because everyone recognizes Twitter more. When we bought the Key on FT, we recognized Twitter instead of the wallet account on Base. Therefore, the essence of making DID products is that you must be able to gather huge traffic and have a large user base before you are qualified to talk about DID. Instead of making a DID, you can use it as the entrance and key. WeChat and Alipay have already verified this.
2. Is it possible to divert traffic from a large traffic pool instead of building a self-built traffic pool?
The main discussion here is the difficulty of success or explosion. The reason why I am less optimistic about protocol-based social applications and more optimistic about ponzi+ applications is because the latter is more likely to succeed. Because it is much easier to dig a hole in a large pond and divert water to a small pond at home than to build a large pond and fill it with water yourself.
For example, assume that the mobile phone numbers of China Unicom and China Mobile cannot make calls to each other. There are two solutions to this pain point.
Solution one: Solve it from the bottom, either let China Unicom and China Mobile change their own technology, communicate well about the distribution of interests, optimize the infrastructure, and realize interoperability between the two operators; or more thoroughly, start an operator from scratch to achieve both China Unicom can also make calls to China Mobile and will not be restricted by the other two companies; or it can create a protocol layer to allow China Mobile and China Unicom to access and achieve interconnection. It will be difficult and more complicated to solve it from the bottom, because we must first figure out whether China Mobile and China Unicom cannot call each other because of technical limitations, whether the two companies disagree with their own subjective wishes, or a combination of both, and what causes this situation Is there any historical reason, etc.
Option 2: Make a dual-SIM dual-standby mobile phone. The user buys cards from two operators. The user does not need to know whether the other party’s mobile phone number is China Unicom or China Mobile. The mobile phone automatically recognizes and dials the corresponding card, thus achieving seamless operation at the user level. feel. The only thing you need to do is buy two cards.
Option two treats the symptoms rather than the root cause, but when one’s own resources and capabilities are insufficient, option two is easier to implement.
Now for the Web3 social project, I want to choose option one when I first come up. I want to revolutionize the lives of WeChat and Twitter. It’s not that it can’t be done, but at this stage, the infrastructure construction of the entire industry is not perfect enough, and the imagination and creativity are not enough. . Even something that web2 product managers are familiar with, such as allowing users to perform insensitive operations and lowering the threshold for use, we need to concretize it into an Intent concept to do something special. It is too early to talk about subversion, but it does not mean that there will be no subversion. I still believe that blockchain was born to make some underlying changes or subvert something, but the time has not yet come.
The successful experience of DeFi has given many people in the industry an inertia of thinking, as if everything can be perfectly replicated on the chain and many people will use it. But at this stage, at the social level, it may be more suitable to optimize some existing products or plug-ins to meet the small needs of users.
One of the reasons for Friend tech’s success is that it has met user needs in the conversion from large traffic pool to small traffic pool (although I think this demand is quite small), such as the need for KOLs to realize their influence, and NFT’s trough period to satisfy KOLs and ordinary users. The need for vanity, the need to satisfy ordinary people’s desire to be strong, etc. At the same time, what FT is doing is converting public domain traffic to private domain traffic. If 1% of the water flow in the big pool comes out, it will be enough for our industry for a long time.
3. Whether to make good use of the communication effect of social applications
Whether a social application’s gameplay and economic model design can naturally guide users to attract traffic from outside is one of the factors that determine its success.
Whether it is a protocol-based social product or a ponzi-based social product, if it wants to be successful, it must solve a problem: how to allow users in the network to spontaneously import external traffic. Protocol-based social products require a large number of users to complete the most basic network effects. Ponzi-type social products require subsequent increments to pay for those who come first.
Taking FT as an example, KOLs can obtain income from key transactions. Within the FT system, users naturally have a tendency to divert traffic to FT from external platforms. Invisibly, a free cold start of KOL publicity was completed. After the first batch of buyer users come in, they naturally have the motivation to promote it so that new people can enter the market and act as exit liquidity.
Social products like ponzi are easier to take advantage of social communication effects because they can tie users and projects into a community of interests from the underlying gameplay. Users can divert traffic to the outside without explicit guidance from the project side. Therefore, when new applications appear in the future, it is particularly important to pay attention to whether their gameplay and model design can guide users to spontaneously conduct external traffic diversion.
Protocol-based social products are relatively difficult in this regard, because the goal of the protocol is to achieve decentralization while meeting the social needs of users. If you want users to voluntarily attract external traffic, you need to use subsidies to allow users to attract people. Although tokens or airdrop points are almost free for the project side, the growth brought about by this method is more linear. That is, the output is proportional to the input, and it is difficult to show explosive growth in a short period of time like the Ponzi type.
Conclusion
Although I am looking for inspiration from the explosion of FT, I think luck is the main factor for FT to reach this height. From product to economic model design, it can be seen that the team did not expect FT to be where it is today. Even without Paradigm that weekend, FT might have been blown away by the rain and wind like its predecessors.
There are too many coincidences and randomness in this industry. The same product may just appear at different times and the players involved may have completely different endings. And such randomness and some arrogance often become the root cause of us missing projects. People who missed StepN back then must have said, Isnt this the fun step of the year?
So my attempt today to find some general experience from the explosion of FT may not necessarily be effective. If a big era is coming, all we can do is to get involved, experience every possibility with an open and humble mind, and then Use the experience of crossing the river by feeling the stones again and again to find the final answer.
