Owlie

A media suggestion engine - a chrome extension that suggests you content based on what your friends are consuming

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Inspiration

Suggestions we get on platforms like Netflix, Youtube, Spotify, and Medium are great. but we tend to be inquisitive about what our friends are watching. So, we built a chrome extension that suggests media based on what your friends are watching

What it does

  1. Add Friends and make privacy settings pop-up image

  2. Owlie tells you where your friends are on the internet whenever you open a New Tab on new tab

  3. Owlie let's you know if your friend is on the same site. so, you can browse the same media content content suggestion

Watch Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/bc21bf8e5d5e49a1b033f16cf8923b2e

How we built it

We built the chrome extension in HTML, CSS, and Vanilla Javascript and the server using NodeJS, Mongo, Docker, and Heroku

Challenges we ran into

  • We used vanilla javascript. chrome pop-up did not allow navigation between multiple .html files. we ended up writing our own router that loads different views into the extension pop-up based on div #id.
  • We hacked ajax to built a near real-time system to show a pop-up with users on the same web page

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had to write a background worker for the browser that keeps tracks of which website the user is on and sync the data to the server based on the user's privacy settings - which was hard to design and implement. We are proud of implementing this feature without comprising on user's privacy

What we learned

We have learned to build chrome extensions, CI/CD to automatically deploy backend to Heroku. But most importantly, how to rapidly spin up a prototype

What's next for Owlie

  • cross-browser support
  • Add friends reviews
  • privacy settings based on friend groups
  • UI/UX polishing
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