Inspiration
People nowadays value everything in social media, from pictures to music, based on the number of likes or upvotes they have. The goal of this project is to revolutionize the way people think by emphasizing how much one cares about a certain idea, rather than the number of likes it has. The best way to do this is by using the SnapChat method on information: put an expiration date, and people will pay attention to it more and live in the moment.
How it works
This web application challenges the notion of using upvotes and likes as the primary way of quantifying the quality and popularity of information, and instead uses time and existence as a far better measurement of the quality of current trends in local communities and more. Essentially, instead of using likes / shares / upvotes for measuring the quality of information, users can choose to extend the life of a piece of information before it permanently deletes itself. Our rationale was that if people find a piece of information or trend particularly interesting or important, he or she will make sure it stays alive, rather than just giving it a simple like or share on another social network. Trends, ideas, and information can be ephemeral, and the goal of this app is to keep the most relevant information in the present, and only in the present. In a way, this is analogous to rolling a snowball to prevent it from melting: the posts are the snowballs, and "rolling" a post will extend its lifespan by a certain amount of time, thereby giving it a certain aura of importance. When an idea becomes irrelevant, time will "melt away" the snowball and the post will deleted, making way for newer trends and information that people find more relevant.
TL;DR Existence and time are a new way of quantifying posts and statuses, and Snowball takes advantage of this by using self-deleting posts and options that extend the lives of posts.
Challenges I ran into
Coming up with the idea was hard, and we weren't sure exactly what platform we wanted to use and if there were any Hackathon APIs that could help us. We eventually came up with the idea by wondering what would happen if Yik-Yak and Snapchat had a love child, and that's where the initial idea for Snowball came from. We found Meteor because one of our team members said it was a good web framework for beginners, and even though we hit some roadblocks like figuring out how to read and write into a Mongo database, we ended with all of the minimum functionality we wanted, and are looking towards the future.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Figuring out Meteor was difficult at first, but we ended up learning a lot about many different technologies. Having the "Snowballs" (what we call the posts) react immediately to the changes of passing time was something really cool to see. We can't wait to hear what other people think about what we did for this project.
What I learned
We learned how to use CSS and HTML5. CSS helped us animate the logo while HTML5 was where we wrote most of test code for the logo. We also learned how to use Meteor and its many packages, as well as test some stuff out with the Google Maps API. We're not sure if we can implement the last part in time, but it's worth a shot!
What's next for Snowball
We will continue developing the platform past the prototype stage if people like the idea. We're looking forward to hearing feedback from our hackathon peers and judges, and we hope that Snowball will become another popular medium of information for college students and others, especially if we decide to make it into a start up.
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