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Applications

Digital representations of our social relationships as a graph were created by social networks. Platforms die and the graphs get lost. Social moved from network to media. Optimising for engagement & leaving a big gap of unfulfilled social utilities of the graph.

Getting network effects is getting harder as we are at the tail-end of the long-tail of user adoption of social networks, with almost everyone already being on one of the platforms.

Attention being a zero-sum game requires new apps to fight with the incumbents with pre-existing networks. Users and Builders both suffer

In order to unlock the next age of social-utility apps, which can be small, and handcrafted but still viable as a business requires the graph-layer to be platform agnostic, user-controlled and portable across apps. It needs to mimic the intimacy & privacy of real life and not be a public square. So the graph needs to be private to the user and revealed to apps and connections based on the context of the use case and the nature of the relationship.

privacy-preserving social graph publishing is to protect individual privacy while preserving graph utility

Apps benefit from users controlling and carrying their graphs with them, as it provides day-zero personalization and a better UX. It also reduces the effort and complexity of a social app by abstracting out the common layer between all apps as a shared infrastructure. With the advent of AI the cost of making such apps can be driven to almost zero and users can also choose to create their custom micro-apps on top of the shared-data substrate.

Some social-utilities that can be built on top of Creole Network

  • A local-first PRM (personal-relationship manager) for a user to store and operate on connections from multiple apps/networks and contacts.
  • A directory app for communities to create and manage member-controlled profiles.
  • A Forever Contact App that auto-updates the contact details when a contact changes their profile, forever.
  • A Smart Form auto-filler which lets user auto-fill fields they have already filled elsewhere, such as their delivery address for all the e-commerce sites they purchase from.
  • A user preference store (”user-owned cookies”) which they can carry across apps to kickstart personalisation without having to build a profile from scratch. Such as, dark mode on every website by default.
  • A birthday reminder app for close friends and family.