RelicRouter: An SDK for Cozy Web Virality
by Matthew McDowell-Sweet (@msms) Miodrag Vujkovic (@miki)
A software development kit for apps that use rules to route blog posts, essays, music, podcasts, video, locations, products, resources etc. (aka “relics”) discovered online to relevant destinations.
Existing relic routing protocols lean on clunky toolstacks and high friction processes. Examples include:
- Regular email digests of interesting artefacts
- Targeted links sent to one person in the wake of a conversation
- The depositing of a relic to a repo for later reference or use
- Posting an on-brand thing to a group chat or private channel
Worse, current protocols exacerbate “route rot”—the phenomenon where the initial intent to share a discovered relic with someone, knowing it will resonate, decays over time due to the friction and unsuitable affordances involved in the act of sharing. As these intentions fade, relic circulation is artificially constrained and relationships that could have deepened do not.
Our SDK, in contrast, will enable apps that protocolise these relic routing patterns and nurture emerging/existing relationships. It will allow apps with end user workflows that:
- Simplify relic capture, triage and annotation
- Support routing at different tempos/volumes and for distinct segments
- Output relics to any channel or medium
- Permit both sender and recipient-side composability
- Interop with and leverage ML and AI tech
Q&A
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance? Eg: hand-washing, traffic system, connector standards, carbon trading.
The sharing of something found online with someone/to somewhere that it is especially relevant.
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
Routing something to a person or place whom you know will appreciate it should be as easy as realising its relevance in the first place. Right now, it is not.
People engage with blog posts, essays, music, podcasts, video, locations, products and resources they discover online. During engagement, the relevance of a thing to a particular individual, group or audience crosses an implicit threshold and is realised. It is is then annotated—either immediately or a short while later—with minimum viable context and distributed via whichever channel/medium best matches the communication context of the emerging/existing relationship.
People do this continuously, in spite of inherent friction in the processes and regardless of the lack of not-quite-fit-for-purpose tools.
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol? Eg: field observation, expert interviews, historical data analysis, failure event analysis
Product discovery methods (e.g. customer conversations, async continuous discovery) to understand the behaviours and systems people currently use to route relics to relevant destinations.
Cognitive task analysis to pursue a deeper comprehension of the cognition involved in discovering, engaging with, and routing relics to specific people and places.
In what form will you prototype your improvement idea? Eg: Code, reference design implementation, draft proposal shared with experts for feedback, A/B test of ideas with a test audience, prototype hardware, etc.
We will select key end user workflows that the apps based on our SDK would enable—e.g. send a weekly email digest, post things with tag X and Y to a specific Discord channel—and prototype them in collaboration with individuals engaging in that behaviour. For example, assembling a bespoke iOS app to generate and send an email digest, building a custom Discord bot to capture a relic and post it.
How will you field-test your improvement idea? Eg: run a restricted pilot at an event, simulation, workshop, etc.
We will involve app developers in the formulation of the SDK (e.g. the priority output channels, the most useful ML/AI interops, the mechanics for sender/receiver composability) and iterate upon prototype workflows that we surface to potential end users.
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
Developers/engineers that want to build applications that use rules to route relics to relevant destinations.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea? Eg: Submit proposal to a standards body, publish open-source code, produce and release a software development kit etc.
We will release a software development kit that enables the development of apps that protocolise relic routing patterns. This will be used to build novel products and tooling for sharing and circulating interesting things in a targeted way. We will also synthesise conducted interviews, analyses and prototyping efforts into longform textual output that references the SDK and contextualises its emergence.
What is the success vision for your idea?
We build the SDK that solves curation for the era of the Cozy Web, Dark Forest and Extended Internet Universe. Envisioned use cases and outcomes downstream of the RelicRouter SDK:
- Consume and annotate a continuous queue of relics and distribute them in digest format at a maximum rate of two relics per day
- Subscribe to a person’s output and elect to receive a monthly XMTP digest containing only relics with tags A, B, C and D
- Post 5 queued items to a token-gated Warpcast group chat every three days and use any relic interactions to inform future 1-to-1 routing recommendations
- Automatically send everything I annotate with tag X and categories Y and Z to a colleague via WhatsApp
- Parse Zoom audio locally, surfacing real-time recommendations from my relic backlog, and share relics I approve with attendees the following day via email
- Submit a podcast show notes URL and indicate the relics I would be most likely to explore and route to my top contacts based on my past behaviour
- Construct a new standard for accurate, aggregated and anonymous relic analytics based on relic routing, zero knowledge and content addressing tech
- Relics that achieve virality autonomously (think semantic samizdat) because one localised resonance pattern matches with other group’s/community’s relic-resonance profiles
classic example use case. Things happen in a place; they get logged; the things that happened get sliced off the queue and shared with those who are interested.