POKE ULTRA UNIVERSE

Inspiration

Poke dramatically simplifies our life, but the experience is very isolating. My Poke agent doesn’t recognize or care that other people also have agents, so it only interacts with humans and treats everything else as external.

When we want to give Poke a new skill, we have to go through the setup process of setting up the MCP, and then adding it as a custom integration to Poke each time.

But, what if there was a better way?

A way where Poke agents can be identified across services, and a marketplace to opt-into Poke optimized applications and exist in a world with other Poke agents?

We have a vision where we can claim a username, and then it gives us access to:

Facebook for all Poke users where people can have a profile and be discovered by other Poke users.
Splitwise for all Poke users where people can split expenses with other Poke users

No more appstore, no more different social media accounts. Everything is under your Poke identity and everything is done through Poke.

What it does

We've built the identity layer for Poke. It allows users to claim unique usernames and use any Poke applications under that identity with minimal setup (hardest part is copy-and-pasting)!

For application developers, we’ve derived a standard protocol to easily create apps for our market place, becoming instantly available to any Poke agent that uses POKE ULTRA UNIVERSE.

Use case 1

Imagine I’m a new user on Poke. What is the first thing I want to do? I want to know who else is using Poke. There is no good way to do that. I could post on social media? Ask my friends? Maybe.

With the identity layer, this becomes insanely simple. We claim a username on POKE ULTRA UNIVERSE, opt into Faceduotang (Canadian version of facebook, Poke native app), and we can instantly be connected to everyone else who is using Faceduotang.

Use case 2

Imagine I just paid the bill for 5 people, and we want to split it. If we want to split the bill, we need to be all connected on the same service. It's annoying, and it changes for every group.

With POKE ULTRA UNIVERSE, we can simply opt-into the Splitwiser application, and it will allow me to manage funds with any other Poke users who have also opted in. This is all done under the same identity.

Challenges we ran into

Poke stands out for their commitment on user privacy, which became a challenge when our premise was to build a platform for interconnectivity and simply sharing your information with others (assuming consent!). As such, we focused on making the whole sharing model opt-in only, so information will only be shared if given explicit permission by the user.

What we learned

We wanted to build this project because we all saw a vision with what Poke could do with our personal lives. Building something you have passion for made this worth beyond just a project and is something we will strive for in all future hackathons.

What's next for us

Poke has strong measures against leaking information, so we want to focus on security refinement because of our use case. For example, with an admin-level authorization, we can control which extensions get approved onto the marketplace to ensure users only use legitimate apps. We believe the POKE ULTRA UNIVERSE is the grand step towards interconnectivity for both Poke and the world of communication, and it all starts with simplifying our lives.