Fistbump

Inspiration

After looking at other social networking apps like Snapchat and Twitter, we discovered a common flaw: None of them encourage real, in person communication. Connecting with people in person builds deeper connections and builds stronger friendships than online communication ever can. This lack of widespread in-person connections shows; there is a post-COVID student loneliness epidemic, with 49% of US college students reporting they feel generally lonely in their day-to-day life.

To tackle this issue, we built Fistbump.

What it does

Fistbump is a social networking app that links you with other users. Each day, you recieve 1 random user, with whom you must meet up with in person, and take a picture with them. After this, your image is shared to the wall, where everyone can see connections being made with their friends.

This short act of meeting up to take your Fistbump together finishes the hardest step of meeting new people: Breaking the ice. After meeting each other, the two users are physically close and have talked, and this small connection could lead to more conversations, activities done together, shared phone numbers, and eventually, a new friendship.

How we built it

Flask back-end server
HTML, CSS, and JS front-end and camera access.
Constructed API with centralized system to handle information transfers
Communication between API and front-end with POST requests
MySQL database structure to store user information, posts, connections
Fully-fledged log in system with 256 bit encryption
Networking between different users through our server

Challenges we ran into

Time constraint: We found out about this hackathon and thought of this idea about 20 hours before the deadline Knowledge constraint: Most of our team did not know much about handling networks, leaving us to learn as we went Skillbase constraint: As we did were not confident in our ability to make a mobile app in this time period, we opted to make the proof of concept as a website

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished this proof of concept in a day, making scalable, readable, and reliable code in a short time period.

What we learned

How to build cross user networking systems
How to plan out web and network architecture

What's next for Fistbump

Mobile version
View friend networks
Smart matching algorithm to match you with people you might know, or people your direct friends might know who you would be more likely to be friends with
Smart for you page that uses your network to determine who you interact with the most, and display their bumps at the top of your wall
Streak leaderboard
Bump groups for people in a shared location; network will match with others in group
Group fistbumps with more than 2 people
Report inappropriate images on wall
Bonuses for fistbumps in specific locations (may be sponsored, i.e McDonalds pays to be a bonus location)
Badges/stamps for accomplishments
Like & save people's bumps
AI image recognition to confirm bumps have the correct people in them