The Social App of the Future

Summary:

Modern life makes it hard to find each other.

Let's use tokens to make it easier.

Here's the social app of the future:

1. Download the app.
2. Connect your crypto wallet.
3. The app reads the list of your tokens in your wallet.
4. The app matches you with people in your city who have similar tokens.

Why will this work ?

Because holding a token is an honest signal about your values.

Broadcasting your opinions is cheap and easy. Publicly backing them with some money shows real commitment.

You can't afford to hold all the tokens in the world. No one can. You have to choose, and you'll choose based on what's genuinely important to you.

This is a much stronger, more real picture of you than today's social profiles.

I think that in the future:

• Every influencer will have a token.
• Every football club will have a token. [1]
• Every book will have a token.
• Every company will have a token. [2]
• Every school will have a token.
• Every church will have a token.
• Every city will have a token.
• Every meet-up group will have a token.

So, you'll be able to ask the app "Is there an event anywhere tonight with people interested in Yoga, Finance, Spanish, the game of Go, and / or Gaetano Mosca ?".

Then it picks the best match, you buy a ticket from the event organiser in the app, and you go hang out.

Ideally, the app will also perform the initial introductions, like this: "Carlos and Angela, I'd like to introduce you - you've both read The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt, and added its NFT to your profile."

Genuine connection comes from spending time with people who share your values and interests.

Modern life makes it hard to find each other.

Let's use tokens to make it easier.

I hope you found this article interesting and insightful. Thank you for reading it. Take care, and good luck.

~ StJohn Piano

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PS: A runner-up image generated for this article:

This one is cleaner and sharper, but I preferred the first one's messiness, which I think more accurately reflects the jumbled-up nature of life.

[1] A football club's token is a "programmable badge". It can be used for "authenticated engagement" e.g. voting on halftime songs, voting on questions to ask the players, demonstrating the team loyalty of the online forum moderators, helping fans to easily form groups to travel to games in other cities, and so on.

[2] A token can be used as a "programmable share". Actions & data can be attached to it. For example, you can poll the shareholders' opinions, or offer deals to those who have held shares for a reasonable period of time.

I think that tokens will run alongside shares for quite a while, but later replace them entirely, in exactly the way that computer databases originally ran alongside paper archive systems and then replaced them. (At first the databases were just used for faster queries, but later they came to be regarded as an equally valid source of truth, and so people stopped maintaining the paper systems.)