Proposal:
A community message board featuring calendar and group-chat integration.
Events presented to the user will have a simple "Like" and "Dislike" button, Reddit-style. Liking an event gives +1 to every associated tag, disliking an event gives -1 to every associated tag.
On first run, the user will be presented with some sample tags, and asked to rank them. These first rankings are used to quickstart the user's preference selection, without having to wait for the user to like/dislike certain events.
Tag rankings can be changed manually by the user at any time.
Stores user preferences exclusively locally, never sent to our servers. On refresh, queries the central server for a list of event listings matching the user's preferred tags. Events are then ranked to the user based on how many tags they and the preference selection have in common as well as how many other people have listed themself as interested.
Example user preference sheet:
| Topic | User-rating |
|---|---|
| Socialist Meet-and-Greets | +256 |
| Bicycle Riding | +147 |
| Cold-War Reenactments | +34 |
| Nazi Party Rallies | -42 |
| Competitive Pickle-eating | -74 |
This particular user would get recommended a lot of Socialist events, but would receive relatively few pickle-eating-related events.
The app would then query the server for a list of Socialist events, a list of bike events, and a list of Cold War events. It would first try to find the intersection of all three categories, a socialist bike race based around the Cold War, and then rank other received events according to how much the user likes associated tags and how many liked tags they have.
The aforementioned socialist Cold War bike race would have a score of 437. A Cold War themed bicycle shop would have a score of 181. A Socialist pickle-eating competition would have score of 182.
Hitting a like button for a particular event doesn't just update your user preferences, the app will also store that event on its calendar locally on your device. When you start the app up, you will see a calendar with all your liked events displayed. If you're having second thoughts about going to a socialist pickle-eating competition, you can simply remove that event from your calendar. When an event you liked/saved is coming up in a few days, the app will send you push notifications to your mobile device so you won't forget to go to your favorite events.
There is no dirth of trolls in our world and our app's rating system helps deal with these hapless souls. Say you showed up to your socialist pickle-eating competition, only to find your time wasted because it was fake. You can simply go back into the calendar, pull up your already-happened events and report it for being a nonexistant event. The idiot user who created this fake event will have this factored into their karma score - so that in the future, this user's events will be ranked towards the bottom of the content anybody sees.
The app also will have a group chat function so that you can chat with other users who also are attendees. This helps people communicate with each other about the event and ask the host user questions if they need clarifications.
Simply navigate to the "create an event" page and fill out information regarding to what your event is about, a date and time, your contact information and some relevant tags. Our app will check to make sure that there is no profanity in your listing, and then send your listing to our server. That is the beauty of our platform, users who have preferences towards the tags you specify in your event listing will find your event at the top of your feed. It is the ultimate win-win!
Our server will contain a database with all the posted event listings from our users. As said before, the app will send the server the user's preferences and in return will get back a queried list of relevant events. This opens up a window for targeted advertising, in this case we would query a separate list of ads based on their similarity to the given user's tag preference. However, we will not keep a copy of the user's preferences/tag data on our servers. Any information sent to us will be kept temporarily to query results - but as soon as the server has sent out the approriate data back to the user, that user's preferences will be destroyed.
We understand that people's user preferences should be private to them, thus we will take all steps to ensure that data is sent securely. All connection between the app and our AWS server will be SSL encrypted. The group chat function will also be encyrpted using an implementation of Signal, an Open Whisper Systems product.