letsreunite
Facebook App to invite the friends from locations around the globe.
Our app - “Lets Reunite” is intended for the users who are going to travel / want to travel to any place and hence want to meet their friends/family who are at that location, at that time. Hence, these user can open our app and will be able to visually view the current locations of their friends/family on a google world map. Next, they may plan to travel to the place where they want to meet most of their friends and family or if they have already planned to travel to a destination then they can view their friends and family who are located at or nearby that destination. Next, they can let their friends/family know that they are coming to that location by creating a facebook event. Adding guests to this Facebook event has been made really simple and intuitive. Friends/family from neighboring cities/states can also be selected/invited to this event. Moreover, the user can easily drop the added friends/family from the created event and the Facebook event invite will not be sent to those individuals.
We envisioned that our app will have the main feature of showing the friends of the user visually on a world map. Next, on our list was the ability to create reunion/party facebook events based on a certain location on the app and the friends/family near that location can be invited as guests to that event. Lastly, we were planning to diversify this app to suit all travelers. That is, if any user is going to Switzerland then he should be able to not only know which of his friends/family are living at/nearby that place but also the history of which of his friends/family have visited that place. I think maybe we can show their visit path in the map and set their pin as more transparent to indicate that this certain user has visited this place. This would help him get additional info about that place from those friends/family and hence, he could prepare much more effectively.
Prioritized List of the implemented Features:
Login Logout Get Friends Locations Get Friends Images Add the Google Map Component Export friends locations to google map api export the friends images to the google map Customize the Google Map Marker for friends Group the people in an area Fix the location bug in the google map api Create event with people in a certain area Give event creation flexibility to the users Allow Radius filter function Allow Click Event on the map Enable Search function
Fringe Benefits: We conducted the usability testing on several of our friends and our friends used this app in varied ways. To mention a top few:
- One of our friend was applying to the colleges in US and he used this app to view his friends who are at/nearby those universities all at once. This saved him a lot of searching time on facebook.
- Another of our friend used this app to create cool infographics of where his friends are migrating the most.
Known Issues: 1. Friends without any location facebook update are not part of this app. 2. Sometimes the grouping of friends at a particular location is not apt and the number of friends at that location is hidden. 3. The loading time is quite long, the data fetching algorithm can be optimized. 4. There is a little bug now - if you use the event radius filter function, you will find you can click the area inside that blue circle to pin yourself. This bug is related with the layer function in google map api.