Amplifire (social media)

Amplifire is a new way to amplify the voices of women, non-binary, and trans people who have been silenced for decades. Customize your own profile to start posting your stories, advice, or questions.

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Inspiration

I was inspired by the customizability of MySpace as a way to share your personality. I also take inspiration from my mom, who is a powerful and successful women in the Tech Industry and frequently goes to conferences to encourage women to pursue a career in STEM. But from watching her, I know it's not easy to be in this industry, which is why it is so important for us not to feel alone in girlbossing.

What it does

Amplifire is a simple website design focused on giving users a creative outlet to express their personality, opinions, and creativity. It is specifically geared towards women, non-binary, and trans people to share their voices and create communities, but Amplifire is open to absolutely anyone as long as they would like to use our product to spread love, not hate.

Currently, the website is a prototype to show future capabilities of what we hope Amplifire could become. There is a home page, where a user would be able to see posts from specific users and communities that they follow based on their interests. They would also see popular posts on the site so that their feed is not limited to what they specifically curate.

Additionally, there is an example user page that is customizable, from the banner to the background all the way to the text color. In the future, we hope to be able to even customize the font on users' pages!

How we built it

We built Amplifire using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also used ChatGPT to assist with some of the HTML structure as well as some JavaScript coding when we got stuck.

Challenges we ran into

  • We attempted to implement a log-in system using Google Cloud and MongoDB. However, due to our limited background in cloud computing, we were unable to implement a scalable site and database.
  • We also wanted to implement AI as a way to help curate a "discover" page for a user based on their previously expressed interests, liked posts, followed communities, etc. However, this would require a lot of coding in Python as well as merging that with HTML and we simply did not have time.
  • It also took a lot of effort to make the website aesthetically pleasing, which was very important to us. This was the skill that we chose to hone in on during the project after complications with the back-end mechanics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing that I am most proud of accomplishing in this project is having a customizable feel to the user profile. MySpace was losing traction by the time that I got on social media, so I never got to experience the ability to customize so much about my social media account! It would be exciting to me to see this implemented in the future.

What we learned

I learned a lot more about HTML, CSS, and especially JavaScript. I am hoping to become even more well-versed in these languages and discover other tools to help integrate and make the process easier!

What's next for Amplifire?

We want to continue working on establishing a database for Amplifire to allow actual users to sign in. Of course, we hope to be able to host the site somewhere too! But before all of that, we will have to flesh out the framework of the site.

Eventually, we hope to keep a log of posts so that we can implement machine learning tactics to analyze posts that a user has liked and curate a discovery page catered to their interests.

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