Social Ketchup

Users get informed if partner disconnected. Users whose partners have disconnected are prompted to start a new chat.
Here you can login or register with a normal email (general category) or a .edu email which connects you to other students from same univ
This is the staging area. Hitting "Go" puts you in the appropriate pool for connecting with other users randomly
Users are notified of the partners they are connected with. You can socialize with a new person from the same university by pressing "next".
You can make new friends, make plans to meetup, get advice, make confessions when connected to other students.

Inspiration

Most of the fun stuff and socializing happens in colleges and universities amongst young undergrad students. There is no specific website for students to find new friends, make confessions, seek advice, socialize outside circles, get a party buddy or maybe just get a blind date. There is no social website which is dedicated to allowing students to actually “socialize” and get to know people outside their social circles. The pandemic amplifies this further.

What it does

An instant real-time socializing web app which allows @university.edu verified students to connect with each other, outside their social circles, randomly. The connection happens between students who are in the same university (so they can connect better!).

How we built it

Runs on a Flask backend with mongoDB for storing user information. Uses multiple pools and socket connections to randomly connect users from the same university. We currently support 3 university email ID's: @oregonstate.edu, @iu.edu and @ucdavis.edu

Challenges we ran into

Websockets are a tricky domain to deal with. Especially with a framework like flask, which has a lesser community than, say NodeJS socketIO. Establishing the right socket connections, generating random rooms, connecting .edu verified users with other verified users from the same university, triggering relevant events while gracefully handling them on our client side were some of the interesting problems we faced.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting our socketIO server to work and connect new verified users with each other was really full-filling! Verified users can socialize and find new friends online, even more given this pandemic!

What we learned

Learnt a lot about git, all the team members were new to some parts of the tech stack and being in the coding zone for 48hrs helped us learn a lot! It was totally worth it!

What's next for Social Ketchup

Corporate ketchup -- extend the idea to connect people with industry email ID's, for e.g. @amazon.com, @fb.com, @google.com
Showing users interests of their connected partners will allow for interesting conversations.
If you like who you are talking to, you would be able to create a permanent private chat room with them
Ability to ban/report students for misbehavior