Flock

A social aggregator that finds the most trending events in your city

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Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the wealth of events and happenings at any given point in New York City. We felt the need to create a service which aggregated these events and the attendees sentiments to create a comprehensive event schedule.

What it does

Flock uses the Twitter API to find trending events in a given city or metro area. When the user selects a city, our service retrieves trending hashtags in that area from Twitter. Using the tweets within these hashtags, our backend application aggregates the vibe of events in a given area and creates a comprehensive list. Using this technology, the users would be able to find things to do and make plans suited to their interests.

How we built it

We developed this concept using Photoshop and OneNote. First, we developed our idea using 'user stories' and 'wireframes' in Microsoft OneNote. This allowed us to come up with an ultimate user experience for our target demographic (young, tech savvy city-goers).

Using this work, we moved on to Photoshop to further develop our concept. Here, we developed a clean and modern user interface. Using gradients, light shadows, and the material design concept, our team developed a simple and intuitive design to view tweets and to find cool events.

Challenges we ran into

From the very start our project, the Internet connection at the hackathon did not work. Therefore, it was nearly impossible to work or collaborate. Documentation of APIs and frameworks were totally unavailable, and so development was therefore halted for many hours. Additionally, our package managers, bundling software, and version control software was unable to connect to the necessary servers. Despite these roadblocks, we spent our time at MLH Prime developing our concept and developing our user interface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to produce a plan and user interface for our concept despite major challenges along the way. Without Internet access, we were able to develop our idea as far as we could using the resources available to us.

What we learned

One of the most significant lessons we learned was that the Internet is taken for granted--especially in the development process. Additionally, we learned to pivot when resources are limited. This lesson was also very essential because it gave us experience in dealing with major roadblocks during a project.

What's next for Flock

We plan on developing Flock further. The concept is exciting to us and is something that we would use in our daily lives. We hope that Flock can grow into a service to help people answer a common question: what are we doing tonight?

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