# Why Farcaster Frames are important (Spindl) Source: https://blog.spindl.xyz/p/why-farcaster-frames-are-important Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Why-Farcaster-Frames-are-important-Spindl?index=0x65b7f64746b88ca932e6945a166e87c767b593263b2469d2fe0657b26836994fe473dfa9 Submitted by ccarella.eth on 2024-01-29 UTC, 19 upvotes, 2 comments ## Summary Spindl argues that Farcaster Frames are a significant Web 3 development: a way to run one app inside another with little coordination, backed by the shared state of the blockchain. Frames builds on the Open Graph Protocol, which Facebook launched in 2011 with Open Graph but which the article says has been largely forgotten until now. The article states that since Frames launched on a Friday, Spindl counted 313 apps launching 526 Frames, and that a Doom game was also run inside Farcaster. ## Article The Doom server running inside a Farcaster frame, thanks to Cassie Heart. Spindl has jumped on the Farcaster bandwagon bigly. Here is our Frames dashboard, with stats on the ecosystem and every shipped Frame. Here is our map of every Farcaster node worldwide (it’s growing!). The year is 2011, Facebook is still a private company many doubt will be a viable business, and the ads system is an embarrassment only good at convincing brands to spend money to collect Facebook ‘Likes’ they don’t know what to do with. At the time, I was among a handful of Facebook product managers trying (and failing) to change that. In the middle of that pre-IPO revenue crisis, the core Facebook team, of which Ads was but a distant and un-influential part, decided to make a huge bet. From my memoir Chaos Monkeys: It involved a nebulously titled product called Open Graph, the first version of which had launched at Facebook’s developer conference F8 … it added the verbal dictionary that accompanied the “Like” button, expanding the Facebook vocabulary to things like “play,” “listen,” “watch,” or “buy.” It was the new subject-verb-object language of everything you did online. Antonio García Martínez listened to Wax Tailor’s ‘Only Once’ on Spotify. Rather than merely express some vague approval via Like, Facebook users could now broadcast everything they were doing, with the aid of outside developers who built Facebook’s new grammar into their products. By doing so, these developers made their products “social,” and potentially viral. In exchange for pumping their data full-throttle into Facebook, those outside developers—music players like Spotify, or publishers like the Washington Post—got News Feed distribution, driving yet more users to their content and services. That was the dream, anyhow. The idea was a good one: why center the Internet user experience around the rapidly fragmenting networks of Facebook, Twitter and every other network? Standalone media apps like Spotify and Netflix were growing rapidly: why not tie together all the consumer experiences together with the social network, benefitting both? In practice, the entire effort and its accompanying ads product was a monumental flop, threatening the company’s looming IPO. Only a frantic product-building scramble in the following year shipped most of the ads product that made Facebook the trillion-dollar company it is today. Ironically, the somewhat-forgotten Open Graph Protocol has recently been resurrected to power the hottest new feature of Web 3: so-called Frames inside onchain social network protocol Farcaster. For those unfamiliar with Farcaster, think of it as a kind of Twitter/X product, but built on the blockchain. Farcaster is just the underlying protocol (like SMTP is the underlying protocol to email): To actually use it, you need a client like Warpcast to ‘see’ the actual social network. What we have in Frames is a new Web 3 primitive that Web 2 could never really power: an easy way to run app X while a user is still inside app Y, with little coordination between X and Y. The interoperable identity and transaction record of the blockchain, along with the seamless handling of money and digital ownership, makes it possible to have a real and universal graph of user actions across consumer apps, something even Facebook at the height of its popularity couldn’t manage. Frames is a deceptively simple experience: a user simply shares a link to a website which, under the hood, is festooned with the OG tags defined by the Open Graph Protocol1 lo these many years ago. A Frame opens like a portal to another app, allowing that other app direct access to the user. From the Web 2 perspective, it doesn’t seem much different than the