Inspiration
University students have too many people to talk to. Social exhaustion lowers people's willingness and ability to find the talk they want. QuikTok is an optimization tool that helps you connect whenever and wherever. Our inspiration on QuikTok centered around finding a way to connect people together as organically as possible, while minimizing the amount of technology involved. You say what you like, you pair, and you meet those in your close proximity before chatting instead of an impersonal, over the internet back and forth. Social media plays a large role in persistent social connection, but we wanted to stray away from calling or texting and go back to what true human connection has always been about, truly being in the presence of those around you.
In terms of use cases, we thought it would most optimally be used with the elderly, college campuses, libraries, with those seeking connection, or any communal space that would be easy to traverse.
What it does
QuikTok is an anti-social-network social networking app, aimed at empowering nearby users to meet up face-to-face, with immediate, pre-selected topics. A user will set up a party with one or multiple topics they would like to talk about immediately, and people nearby in the close vicinity will be able to join in on that session, already knowing what the they'd like to talk to each other about. The app will find each other's indirect locations, ideally really close by, and the further in the process of session creation they are, the more accurate the location will become. In essence, a user pre-selects a topic (or multiple), people see a list of topics and a general location of that user and choose whether they would like to proceed to meet in person or not. If they do, they are given the location of the host.
Features include:
- Login screen (every user has an account)
- Get location (users put in their location, using a draggable map feature)
- Start page where you can host or join a talk from.
- Edit settings and see talks near you
- Host track -> Show participants
- Join track -> Show talks near you
- Once you select the talk, an "on the way" page
- Both of those end pages lead to the final page where it tells you everyone who is going to the event.
How we built it
- API - Flask
- Database - MongoDB Atlas for dynamic database adjustment during development
- Frontend - HTML & CSS
- Planning - Draw pages and and database design and show on Google Doc for communication
- Environment and Deployment- CodeSandBox for real-time collaboration
- User Geolocation Info - HTML Geolocation API
Challenges we ran into
As it was most of our first hackathons, our greatest issues lied mostly with planning and time constraints, and knowing what features to sacrifice for the sake of getting a tangible, displayable project. Initially, we wanted to create a mobile app as we felt it incorporated our ideas as completely and functionally as possible.
At one point, we struggled with our database and going from function-to-function. When we wrote the APIs initially, we implemented a quick fix in order to get the ground running, but this ended up costing us about 4 hours of debugging. Although we made some mistakes along the way, we now know what to avoid for next time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of all the progress we made and having something visible to show for it. We're happy that we were able to get the entirety of the project up and running and implemented, even if it meant scrapping some functions we would have liked to include. We're proud of the UI implementation as we did it without using React, and for the front end being made with HTML and CSS. And most importantly, we're proud of our ideas as we think there is a real benefit in its use cases in order to help people be a little more connected.
What we learned
We gained a lot of experience and learned many valuable lessons on the way of creating QuikTok. We'd say our biggest areas of improvement for next time would be when we were writing the APIs. We wish we would have planned it more appropriately, and researched more on data types. Even though we drew a rough draft of how we would comprise our data and what steps we would take during each process, we never really considered how we would transfer this data in the first place. Moving forward, if we continued with another hackathon, this is definitely something we would keep in mind.
What's next for QuikTok
- Move onto mobile App
- Deploy on Cloud
- Pre-defined talk topics
- Recommendation algorithm for most relevant topics
- Interested topics as user profile configuration
- “Shake and talk” simply shake the phone to get auto-pair up
- Fast dating version
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