Promptu is a social media platform based entirely on spontaneous voice messages that answer daily engaging and fun prompts.
We created Promptu to eliminate the pressure of traditional social media and enable more natural online presence. We seek to create a place for users to have fun, genuine, and impromptu interactions that imitate in-person banter.
Humans spend between 32% and 75% of their waking time in social interactions and on average 2 hours 27 minutes using social media. Clearly a significant portion of social interactions is occurring online hence the abundance of different unique social media platforms. One of the great things social media allows us to do is bridge the distance with people we often wouldn't be able to see face to face. However, the way these platforms are designed puts a lot of pressure on building your digital profile, and they all rely on image and text as a medium of communication. These mediums are effective but also limit how genuine the online interactions are. Think about last time you posted on social media - how much time did you spent fixing your post and considering how people will react to every photo you post or sentence you write? That is not how in-person communications happen, you don't have time to think about your answers thoroughly - you're forced to be genuine and that's what makes them real and fun. We would like to see more of that in the digital space.
This is why our way of "taking inspiration from the past and add a twist to it" is to completely rethink the whole dynamics of social media interactions from the ground up. To make those digital interactions more human-like, less serious, and more fun. Our solution is a social media platform based entirely around short spontaneous voice posts following unique prompts that change daily. Allowing users to interact with their friends in a way more similar to how they do in person, by cracking jokes, making funny comments about what is around us, and sharing laughs!
Our stack includes the following:
- Frontend: React.js
- Backend: Firebase (Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Firestore), JavaScript
- UX Design: Figma
Originally, we wanted to develop our frontend using React Native but we were unable to set it up on our machines. We decided to use React after a few hours of debugging React Native.
We are proud of our team for working so well together and enjoying the process of creating an app within 24 hours. We were able to make an application wireframe, develop the entire frontend in React, and set up the backend and user authentication in Firebase.
This was the first hackathon for 2 of our team members, so it was very exciting to ideate a software product and then immediately oversee the entire development for the first time. Some technical learning we did included how to authenticate users using Firebase, how to record and listen to audio files using React, and how to use the Firebase and Firestore SDKs.
We want to add a feature for adding and searching friends. We also want to sort the feed in the future by most popular (quantified by highest number of smiles - our version of Reddit upvotes). We also want to incorporate NLP to detect inappropriate audio messages that are uploaded by users. This will make sure that our app remains a fun, safe, and welcoming space for all.
Thank you so much to HackHarvard for this great experience. Our whole team became very close, and had an engaging and educational time! We are excited to continue iterating on Promptu and hopefully launch to the iOS and Android app stores.