v0

[oaksprout]

In progress...

---

This discussion can serve as a place to create consensus about what constitutes a good first release, and what we're aiming for the audience to take away.

Background

• Web3 (in the broadest sense – i.e. the Open Web but also DeFi and whatever comes in the future) will be mediated by Ceramic, which makes it possible to de-couple UI from information
• Ceramic defragments the web by generating web-wide consensus around data structures. Ceramic will force the internet to ask and answer the question "what is X?" and then provide a pointer on the internet to where that thing is, and exactly how you can interact with it.
• For this reason, we believe Ceramic is the Google of the next-generation internet. Where Google seeks to "organise the world's information" and is fundamentally limited by the current state of siloed, centralised and non-homogeneous data structures, Ceramic encourages information holders to open it up and work with other organisations to create consensus and enable incredible layers of composability on top.

Vision

• Ceramic is focused on the underlying layer though – what do the services which sit on top of this new organising layer look like? The interaction layer – apps – processing services like algorithm, recommendations engines etc. How do they work?
• This is where we want to come in.
• Tiles aims to incentivise the creation of a rich processing layer on top of Ceramic
• experience a document on Ceramic as a simple UI. Or experience it as a voice track, or as a short video, or as a long video.
• Lenses will be much more broadly applicable than just humans consuming information though. [come up with good illustration of generic info processing module]

What is Tiles today?

• Tiles will initially focus on the processing of data for display and editing via UI components
• When you try to view a stream which has lenses available, you'll be able to switch between them to find a view that meets your needs.

Who will use Tiles and why?

• At first, Lenses will be consumed by users who are looking for high quality UIs based on underlying Ceramic streams.

How will Tiles work?

• When you arrive on a stream, we query a lens index which does a lookup to find all the available lenses for this schema
  • those are then presented to you in a dropdown

Why would I want to get involved as a Lens Creator?

• Ultimately, Lens Creators will be financially rewarded for developing Lenses
  • how will this work?
    • in order to use the Tiles browser, users will top up a wallet and make micropayments whenever they access and interact with a lens
    • these micropayments will largely be paid out to the Lens Creator and in part to the supporting browser
• this is attractive for frontend developers (and other types of stream processing developers further down the line) because it creates a business model that is much simpler and more fine-grained than on the current web. A developer no longer needs to work for a big company and bundle their skills with sales, marketing etc. They can niche down on what they do best and get paid directly.
• in the short-term it will be unlikely that users will be able to make micropayments for accessing lenses. So initially, rewards will be paid out to lens creators in the form of token rewards and based on a yet-to-be-designed function of utility and usage.

Who can get involved?

• initially infrastructure for creating Lenses is focused on UI components. So we expect the first people to build on the platform to be frontend developers, specifically React developers.

There aren't many streams on Ceramic yet – do you have any ideas for streams to create and build lenses around?

• there is a huge amount of potential – some ideas – streams for:
  • all the tokens across chains in DeFi
  • accessing The Graph subgraph endpoints
  • free recipe databases
  • See more Stream Families #28

How do I create lenses?

• Head over to the docs for more info on how to get started creating lenses