Synereo (AMP)

Synereo’s first application provides an attention economy layer for existing social media networks, bridging them with user generated content platforms (YouTube, SoundCloud, Medium) to allow content creators and curators to benefit directly from the value they create. During this alpha phase, we’ll invite Synereo’s community members to help test our product assumptions, refine the attention economy model, and provide feedback for the user experience.

Soon after the alpha, based on everything we’ve learned and on ongoing development, the product will graduate to “Minimal Viable Product” status. This means we’ll be able to release it to a wider public and increase Synereo’s operational capacity around it - finding the right audiences, creating more tools, developing partnerships, refining the UI, and so on.

If it’s a layer to be used with any content platform and distribution channel, it better have an easy way to implement in any service!

Create Partnerships, Support More Platforms Developing the business around the product, Synereo will go after more platforms that can benefit from its offering as well as find content creators, distribution channels, and communities interested in adopting it. This will expand the amount of people generating value and the reach of the emerging economy. We are already in touch with a few relevant projects in the decentralized space.

remove need for Synereo centralized database and logic There currently does not exist a Blockchain answering our requirements, able to run the Attention Economy logic in a secure and scalable manner. We will continually follow and research the available Blockchains that are most compatible with our requirements. As we all know, this is a rapidly evolving space. It’s especially important for us to find a stable blockchain solution with a good smart contracting story. Another important consideration that informs the design of the decentralized version of the Attention Economy is the issue of bot networks. Synereo is designing a platform with economic models that are sybil attack resistant, discouraging users from investing in bot networks as there would be little to no financial gains from doing so. The reward mechanisms that would be implemented encourage early users to refer their friends to join the growing Synereo community and benefit from creating and curating high quality content, knowing that if they are connected indirectly to a bot field, they are still going to benefit from providing value to their communities.

The first full release of the application, on par with the standards of webapps you’ve come to know and love on the Internet. Synereo will kick the business around this product into high gear while preparing to shift into phase 2.

In the alpha phase, data will be collected into a centralized staging database. In order to calculate the rewards that content creators and curators receive, information about content that is posted and amplified will be recorded. This will help us test and modify the economic model, and design the best system that provides the necessary incentives to create and distribute high quality content. In this stage, this data and the social network graph data that will continue being generated will be directly fed into the decentralized social networking platform we will spin up, securely and privately stored on the blockchain. Users could choose to participate in an opt-in program and voluntarily share data with Synereo to help us modify the economic models and strengthen our backend processes.

emove need for centralized social networks We are targeting WebRTC as the most likely base solution. It’s our belief that WebRTC presents us with a fantastic new opportunity for pushing more of the application layer into the browser, further removing the need for servers located in datacenters. WebRTC allows users to connect directly to one another (in peer-to-peer fashion) in their web browsers, without the need for communications to be proxied by a third-party server (i.e. middleman). We’ve been building prototypes for this communications layer coupled with DHT (distributed hash table) capabilities using WebRTC, along with IPFS, and are excited about the potential of this combination.

[will likely initially rely on centralized CDNs] With information gathered through the application and a network effect bootstrapped through relying on existing networks, Synereo will be able to hit the ground running with its decentralized social networking application – already populated with users, their social graphs, their identities and histories – all security stored on the blockchain, privately owned, accessible and controlled by them only (not even by us!).

remove need for centralized content platform We are targeting IPFS as the most likely base solution. IPFS fits our purposes well as it allows users to provide their resources and participate in facilitating in the content delivery network. It does not rely on centralized infrastructure that can lose history, censor content, or block users from accessing the network. Studies by IPFS have shown the possibility that their P2P network is already more efficient in serving content than centralized networks in some parameters. Also, we like playing around with their code. We’re also looking at WebTorrent and GitTorret, who are using existing torrent networks (BitTorrent protocol) to build decentralized applications. These protocols are very open and allow developers to build their apps in the way the want, allowing great flexibility.

Once we’ve decentralized the means of social communication, collaboration and information dissemination, we’ll turn to create an application that does the same to user generated content platforms (such as YouTube, SoundCloud, and other sites relying on large data). Synereo users will be able to upload their content directly to a decentralized network, controlling how it’s accessed, monetized, and spread through the network.

With current social networks, you are not the client. You are the product being sold.

The value you create by being a part of the network flows upwards immediately, reaching only a select few: those in control of the network. With Synereo’s completely decentralized and distributed network, you are in control. The value you create stays in your hands. Synereo’s next-gen social network puts security, identity, and community management directly under your purview, respecting your attention and rewarding you for your activity on the network.

This final step brings us to our extended vision, of creating a full suite of tools allowing the easy creation of secure, scalable and reliable decentralized applications. Instead of designing and building a whole chariot before having first invented the wheel(-axle), we learn from industry best practices, only attempting to provide this full, generalized solution after proving the merits of our more specific implementation. Synereo is committed to making all of the work we do in the decentralized space open-source, producing high quality library code for the community.