Today, we’re excited to launch WidgetKit, a browser extension which adds support for embeddable, interactive widgets on Warpcast. Warpcast creators can now embed interactive widgets into casts that other users can use to execute any onchain or offchain actions — right from the comfort of their Warpcast feed.

How does it work?

When creating a new cast on warpcast.com — just type in / followed by a widget collection name, and select a widget from the dropdown.

Here’s an example below of user embedding an interactive nouns voting widget:

Now, other Warpcast users can interact with your cast and follow through with an onchain or offchain wallet action without ever having to leave their feed. Here’s an example of a user voting on a Nouns proposal without ever having to leave Warpcast:

Now — A browser extension for Warpcast users

At launch, the following two widgets are supported (for demo purposes):

• Type in /nouns and select the Nouns widget from the dropdown to embed a widget that allows your followers to vote on a Nouns proposal.

• Type in /zora and select the Zora widget from the dropdown to embed a widget for minting an NFT on Zora.

You can get started by downloading the extension here.

What’s next for WidgetKit?

We built WidgetKit with an initial, small number of supported widgets to showcase the power of embeddable interactive widgets within Warpcast. There’s obviously a wide variety of widgets that users would find useful inside Warpcast (and other social contexts). A natural extension for WidgetKit is to enable these use cases by creating a protocol / SDK which allows developers to build and publish those widgets in a standardized way.

To enable these use cases, we’re working on the following:

• A shared standard / registry that enables widget developers to publish their widgets onto a namespace — so that it can be brought into social clients in a secure, standardized way (e.g clients for Farcaster, Lens, XMTP).

• A client-side SDK that enables social app developers to easily enable 3rd-party widgets into their web/mobile apps in a secure way — so that their users can leverage widgets without having to use a browser extension.

If you’re interested in publishing widgets or using the SDK, you can contact us here.

Why’d we build WidgetKit?

A major benefit of a sufficiently decentralized social network is that developers are enabled by permissionless APIs to build entirely new kinds of user experiences.

But even with open APIs, developers and users are faced with a few challenges:

Challenge 1: As a developer, every feature (however small), requires building an entirely new client. Once you build a client, you also need to figure out how to bootstrap the client with users. But not all use cases justify an entirely new client. Most of the time it’s more convenient (for the developer and the end user) to just extend the most popular client in a very specific way. Using WidgetKit, developers can now introduce new capabilities to an already popular client by publishing their widget to a namespace (e.g. /zora, /nouns, /party).

Challenge 2: As a user, you have to leave your existing social context (feed, group chat etc.) to take an action. Think things like “vote for this proposal”, “contribute to this crowdfund”, “mint this NFT” etc. While some workflows may justify using an entirely new application, it’s often much more convenient for the user to take that action within the existing social context.

We think these problems are addressed with a secure and standardized way to build and publish widgets. We’re excited to see what kinds of interesting use cases developers come up with. You can get started with WidgetKit here and drop us a line if you’re interested in building widgets.

— Yondon & Salvino