Social Stonks

Inspiration

When you search a stock ticker, Google provides you with information such as a graph and top stories. It does not, however, provide details about what is happening on social media. Given recent events, it is evident that social media, such as Reddit, can have profound effects on stocks, such as GME.

What it does

We took the initiative to develop Social Stonks, a Google Chrome extension that provides trending Twitter and Reddit posts relating to the stock ticker that is searched.

How we built it

Social Stonks is developed using Google's new Manifest v3 API. It is primarily written in vanilla JavaScript, but also contains both HTML and CSS for the user interface. The posts are retrieved from Reddit and Twitter using Mozilla's JavaScript Fetch API.

Challenges we ran into

Manifest v3 is incredibly new; while there is plenty of information about its predecessor online, our research about v3 was primarily restricted to Google's official documentation. The new API is very concerned with the security of its users, meaning that developers are a bit more restricted; therefore, much of our time was spent finding workarounds to problems that have plenty of v2 solutions online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us had any experience with Manifest or Google Chrome extensions. We successfully educated ourselves as to how the API functions, and did not let obstacles stop us from getting Social Stonks to the vision we had in mind. The extension was developed in an orderly fashion, as we built features on top of one another and eventually stylized the interface to match the early wireframe that was designed.

What we learned

This project required a fundamental understanding of working with social media APIs, such as Reddit and Twitter. Additionally, it gave us plenty of experience working with Google's Manifest v3, as well as solidifying our understanding of the async/await functionality of JavaScript.

What's next for Social Stonks

To add to the project in the future, we would like to integrate with more social media platforms. At the moment it was difficult as Reddit and Twitter were the easiest to work with but it would be nice to integrate Facebook and although it would be even harder, instagram. I think the beauty of this project is that it is just displaying the posts that are public so it needs no user permissions or privacy concerns, just search, and we handle the rest.