Team #27 - PeopleStream

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Inspiration

Consuming personalized information sources such as a Facebook feeds or Google Search result in a distorted perception of reality due to the lack of perspectives that are presented. In addition, consumer behaviour has shifted in recent times, with most users preferring to consume news using social media channels as opposed to traditional media publishers. While it provides many advantages, it is clear that the social media is an unreliable news ecosystem that is polluted with deceit, animosity, and manipulated stories. As the Kight Commission concluded on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, news is as vital to democracy as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health.

What it does

PeopleStream is a social media and news aggregator that provides information about thought leaders in the tech industry (for now). Our goal was to aggregate information about thought leaders while helping users navigate the social news ecosystem using a curated group of news sources.

How we built it

Built an Express API that communicates with Twitter API, Instagram API, Media Wiki API, Google News API, Indico API and connects to MongoDB. We then used jquery to call Express routes for the front-end component. The front-end website was developed on Bootstrap

Challenges we ran into

We initially started this project Angular but due to several issues were decided to switch to jquery. We also had merge conflicts using github which resulted in several setbacks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everyone put their best foot forward and took it on themselves to learn new skills. We persevered through various challenges and setbacks and kept pushing till the very end.

What we learned

We learned how to create a MEAN stack application (it lived up to its name) and work with various API's.

What's next for PeopleStream

Continue working on developing this platform and incorporating various features in order to continue working towards our vision. Incorporate indicoAPI fully for sentiment analysis and political analysis of news to promote neutral news. Implement an automated twitter handle retrieval based on nlp to screen for most likely verified user.