I talk to design students about the difference between, utility, usability, and aesthetics. All are important, but utility wins every time. Even Jony Ive said, “If a product doesn’t do what you want it to do, it is ugly.” 

I also love decentralized platforms, and when I found the decentralized social media platform “Farcaster” I got excited. When I found out that Coinbase was going to use it as the protocol for their new Coinbase Wallet app, and rename it “The Base App”, I got even more excited and wanted to develop for it. Farcaster / Base allows social media posts to contain an image and action in a post that launches a “miniapp window” where you can use apps to interact with the timeline and user’s profile. This enables all kinds of interesting possibilities. I saw that the platform lacked the ability to embed a wide range of media into posts, and so I add a “Play” button to a post and then the media plays in the miniapp window, effectively creating media embeds.

You can try it out by going to farcaster.xyz and then typing addplaybutton.xyz into any cast, or launching the “Add Play Button” app from the miniapps catalog.

My app reached #3 in the Utilities category on the Base app, and it’s in the top 100 of all apps available on Farcaster (top 5%).