Inspiration
Social media plays a heavy role in today's political and journalistic climate. Thanks to customized algorithms, it's easy to become trapped in your own little bubble on social media and allow your confirmation bias to make you believe that everyone in the world believes, thinks, and acts the same way you do. face2face was created to foster open, honest discussion about political issues or world events between two users of differing opinions. Hopefully this will allow for users to expand their world view or maybe even gain a new perspective on why others may feel differently than they do.
What it does
face2face is a Chrome extension that becomes active when a Facebook user reacts to any given article published on Facebook. Once the reaction is selected, f2f randomly pairs the user with a user who selected a converse reaction. For example, a user that was happy about an article saying that Roe v. Wade might be repealed will be matched with a person who was sad or angry about the same article. Once matched, the users have the option of communicating via webcam or chat box, depending on what each user is comfortable with.
How I built it
I incorporated Webrtc into a web page (html, css, javascript) hosted on Amazon Web Services, and had a Chrome extension parse through the user's emotions as well as the article that they reacted to, sending them to an entirely private chat room where they can talk.
Challenges I ran into
The website is not entirely finished, and the chrome extension is missing some functionality. Getting the chat box to work was tricky, but thanks to a lot of mentor help, I think it came together quite nicely.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I LEARNED JAVASCRIPT!! :D I'm proud that I got my own website up and running with my own domain, and I also learned how Chrome extensions work, which is really useful.
What I learned
This is a very hard thing to do alone in 24 hours. And Javascript, did I mention that?
What's next for face2face
I want to keep building this, and potentially make it open source for more help? I would like to finish it and publish it to the Chrome extension store for as long as I have free access to the domain.
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