FeedSponge

happy
board
angry
costumes
badges

Inspiration

Doomscrolling can leave us with brain fog: we’ve spent hours looking at things, but can barely remember what we saw. We wanted to make that experience visible, and a little fun to fix.

What it does

Upload a screen recording of your scroll and Feed Sponge reads every post, sorting it into useful, fun, clickbait or rage bait. A sponge soaks the posts up live: it gets happier on useful posts and grumpier on junk. Hold to squeeze it: useful takeaways drip into a jar, and junk splats out.

Then the Goldfish Quiz asks what each post was really about. It also turns what you kept watching for fun into a fun fact you’ll actually keep. You earn badges and join a live leaderboard. At events, the audience scans a QR code and the whole room’s feeds get soaked up together on the big screen.

How we built it

Gemini (on Vertex AI) reads the recording and writes the recap and quiz. Fun facts are checked with Google Search grounding.
The browser pulls one frame per second out of the video, so the video itself never leaves the phone.
A Node server on Google Cloud Run serves the animated web app and the phone page.
Informer Apps is the backend for the social side. It stores sessions, topics and quiz answers (counts only, never content) in its Postgres workspace, awards badges through server routes, and powers a live dashboard: feed health over time, junk by app, quiz accuracy, the leaderboard and a badge wall. Simulated users fill in 30 days of history, and real players appear live alongside them.

Challenges we ran into

Time slices: reading frames often enough to catch every post, but cheaply enough to stay within rate limits. We added batching and back-off so the page slows down instead of failing.
Quiz questions: questions about exact numbers felt like trivia, so we switched to testing the gist of each post.
Never faking it: when the AI can’t finish reading a recording, we say so instead of inventing posts.
Small surprises: the iPhone silent switch muting our sounds, and connecting anonymous audience phones to Informer securely.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Feed Sponge turns a scrolling session into a few takeaways you keep and a quiz grounded in what you actually saw. It’s a playful mascot with 7 moods and seasonal outfits. And it works live with a whole audience: they scan, upload and land on a real leaderboard within a minute.

What we learned

Making screen time visible works best when the experience is playful and the insights are trustworthy. People engage with a sponge that sulks at rage bait far more than with a screen-time number.

What’s next for Feed Sponge

We want the sponge to leave the upload button and live on your phone:

A floating sponge over every app on Android;
A Dynamic Island and lock-screen companion on iPhone;
A gentle warning before it bursts, and an optional feed lock when it’s overloaded;
A way to wash it clean by finishing tasks on your day’s schedule.

We also want to fine-tune a small open model to label posts on-device, for privacy and lower cost.