Alright! I’m officially caught back up on a sleep and life. For those of you severely confused, allow me to explain…
Every year MIT holds an event known as the TechFair. It’s pretty much like a Career Fair, except instead of everyone dressing up in suits and passing out resumes; everyone dresses up in jeans, has really awesome conversations about the latest and greatest tech in the field, and occasionally a resume is passed. This year, however, Facebook decided to sponsor an all-night hack-a-thon the night before the TechFair. The idea of a hack-a-thon is simple: bring an idea (hardware or software) that you’ve never worked on before, grab a team (up to 4), and then build it. You have from 10pm to 8am to implement your idea. In the morning, you will be given the chance to demo your idea and Facebook Engineers will judge the product based on your idea and execution.
It could be theorized that Facebook held the event to a) evaluate potential hires and b) ensure that the 100+ Course 6 (CS) people that participated were too exhausted the next day to make sense when attempting to talk with other companies. However, my thinking went something like this: “an excuse to pursue one of the many project ideas that fills the moleskine on my desk? Sold!”
I spent some time going through my ideas, and decided on a more recent one. It had a simple premise, addressed a real annoyance in my life, and seemed completely feasible to finish a set of core deliverables in one night.
Let’s set the stage…
The Pitch: Social Networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc) seem to have taken on the stance that your life is now, and now only. This real time approach is very much their core mission, but they’re pursuing it at the expense of our past. And by past I could mean 5 years or 5 hours. Twitter let’s us search the world, but not our own social graph. Facebook does, but only within the immediate past. Echo Chamber is a project to bring true search to your own social graph. Find the cool video you saw in your news feed last week or the tweet to a WIRED article from 2 years ago. Why exactly isn’t this already implemented? Now, take it a step further, visualize your social graph’s interest in certain topics over time. Curious what your friends thought of Inception? Well, now you can easily find out.
I really have no idea why this functionality doesn’t already exist, beyond hypothetical technical issues. Many business applications for monitoring a company’s brand through various social media channels have similar such tools, but none of them target the problem for the normal user.
So, that was the challenge. Build a web app that would allow a user to easily search their own social graph. I decided to go with Twitter for phase 0 as I had a decent amount of familiarity with their API, and focused on the search component, leaving the data visualization piece for later. I also decided to go as a one-man team, to add an additional level of challenge.
The Technical: Python + Django + Elixir/sqlalchemy to interface with SQL + Tweepy to interface with Twitter.
The Results:
Core deliverables: met! It definitely needs a good amount of work before it can be released in the wild, but I have to say that it came together amazingly well, given I hadn’t even installed/setup my server environment before arriving.
Out of the 100+ original hackers, 17 teams completed and submitted their projects. After the judging I managed to walk away with two awards: Runner Up and the Highlander Award (for being the only one-man team to finish).
The Fuel: Two cans of coke, a vitamin water, good music, and 2 twenty-minute naps were all that was needed to make it to morning and on to 10pm the next night. Why so late? Well, as a rule of thumb, never say no when Google offers to take you out to dinner…
Lessons: Next year, I will definitely be going with a good team. It was a blast going solo, but it was also a massive crunch to complete each of the core components necessary for the demo. With a team we could have gone beyond the core, adding features and polish – positioning Echo Chamber in direct competition with the first place team of three.
But hey, it was a lot of fun, and that’s what matters.
Great write-up.
I think there would definitely be some good uses to this program – such as recalling a past conversation and wishing you could find it or searching to see what people have thought about certain movies so that you can decide to either watch or not watch them.
I do have a couple of concerns with a program like this, though.
If this were actually implemented on facebook – I’m afraid that this could do more harm than good for many people. Facebook is already a place a lot of people go to basically stalk their friends. Many people obsess over them to a scary degree.
I just see some heart-broken ex or some insecure boyfriend or girlfriend sitting there searching all of someone’s statuses for random things.
Furthermore – people could look up things like who you wrote a <3 to – in order to figure out who you might be dating. They might see if you haven't posted over certain dates and maybe those dates repeat over certain years hinting that you might be out of your house or something (like an annual vacation).
I don't think most people would do this – but I think it's something you should definitely consider. Any ideas how you could stop something like this? I just wouldn't want to see people use this program to find out some information that they could do a lot of harm with and then for it to appear in the news or something.