Inspiration
Coming to college means making new friends, but what about the old ones? Our whole team are out of state students who wanted to find a way to better connect with friends from back home. So we got to thinking about different ways people connect with each other from long distances and found that video diaries and audio messages physically shows how you are feeling in the moment, which creates the greater emotional connection between others. Thus we came up with Friends In A Bottle.
What it does
Friends In A Bottle, is a way to connect with friends. This is done by having a "journal", which is a page that a host can share using a code, where everyone can respond to a promt of their choosing or making per a day and having 3 minutes to answer the prompt either by audio message or making a video. Friends can add pictures and comments under each post. You can also have multiple journals for partners, friend groups, and family. To make the journal feel more present and to make sure that individuals don't forget to respond to prompts, there is a small tablet that comes with it which shows updates of if the user gets a message and displays it on screen.
How we built it
We built the website by coming up with an outline of features we wanted for the web app and implemented them using python, HTML, and SQL. We then used Claude and Cursor to
Challenges we ran into
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
What's next for Friends In a Bottle
adding notifications and streaks
