LinkedUp

New friends are just around the corner. Choose your hobbies & free time, we’ll match you with people nearby to hang out with

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Inspiration

LinkedUp is a platform designed to help people make meaningful friendships in new cities. While many dating apps focus on romantic connections, LinkedUp prioritizes friendships and community. Users can connect with others who share similar interests, form larger friend groups, and attend events together. Whether you click immediately or take time to find your fit, LinkedUp helps you build your social circle and feel at home wherever you go.

The concept of LinkedUp was inspired by LinkedIn. Just as LinkedIn connects professionals to expand their career networks, LinkedUp uses a similar approach to foster personal connections. By matching users based on interests and hobbies, LinkedUp creates a way to discover and build friendships, turning networking into meaningful community-building.

What it does

LinkedUp matches you with users near you based on interests and hobbies in order to make friends in new cities so you do not feel lost.

How we built it

We built LinkedUp using React as our frontend framework, leveraging React Router for seamless navigation and Framer Motion for smooth animations that enhance user experience. The backend is powered by Firebase, utilizing Firestore for real-time data storage and Firebase Auth for secure user authentication. The application follows a service-layer architecture with separate modules for user management, matching algorithms, and chat functionality. We implemented a custom card stack component for browsing potential matches, similar to popular social apps but focused on friendship connections. The real-time chat system uses Firestore listeners to provide instant messaging between matched users. Our matching algorithm considers shared interests, preferred activities, and location proximity to suggest meaningful connections. The responsive design ensures the platform works seamlessly across desktop and mobile devices, making it accessible for users whether they're at home or exploring their new city.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges we ran into where trying to set up a real time chatting system without using sockets in order for users to communicate. Our solution was to use api calls as a temporary solution since our application does not have a lot of users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of getting our real-time chatting feature up. We are also proud of the UI/UX that our frontend developer helped built. Lastly, we are proud of our algorithm that tries to match users on location, interest, and hobbies.

What we learned

Most important thing we learned was how to communicate effectively with each other virtually. I think this is an important skill we will take into the job market since some of us will have to work in a hybrid position or even remote. Also some of our team was able to get hands on experience on how to build a full stack application from 0 to deployment

What's next for LinkedUp

We want to strengthen our security so that we do not get hacked. We also want to optimize our api calls so that our site loads faster. We also want to optimize our algorithm to match people so that its not only faster but also better at matching people. We would also want to have a algorithm to recommend people activities from yelp so that they can try them with new friends.

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