A Web App that allows you to send your Instagram pics to a rigorous color analyst to determine what colors and what people make you the most popular person around.
Technologies: Node.js, Express.js, AngularJS, MongoDB (Mongoose), Milligram, Chart.js, JavaScript
APIs Used: Instagram (Facebook), Cloudinary
Team Members: Eshan Agarwal, Vinay Ramesh, Sunand Iyer, Anthony Panat, and Robbie Netzorg
We wanted to better understand the subtle factors that effect the rise and fall of social medialikes. Looking at all the possibilities, color stuck out to us. Color provided to us a unique perspective on how people enjoy social media content. This being our first hackathon, we wanted to spend time learning the technologies while developing an awesome project.
PopFactor, short for Popularity Factor, analyzes the influence of colors on your photo likes. If you have an Instagram (preferably an active one!). you can connect on our splash page, and view a graph showing the breakdown of the relative strength of the colors in your pictures.
The group split up work into front-end, back-end, and research. The research team spent time developing the algorithm that would eventually return the colors and their respective weights. The front-end team worked mostly on integrating Node with Angular and the views while the back-end team spent time implementing the necessary APIs and setting up the database
While the development and implementation of our mathematical algorithm to weight colors to likes took several hours, the implementation of it took even longer. The data was returned in a very nested format, forcing us to walk through our process flow several times to ensure that all methods were 'wired' properly. It took a while.
Learning how to use new APIs and applying them to something a little eccentric.
Even seemingly simple projects can have very intricate behind the scenes action. At first, we did not expect the project's structure to be so intertwined, hoping that we could bypass having a database by just sending the info to the client directly and that Instagram would be a little easier to implement. Due to time constraints, we often just relied on what worked, which might have resulted in a more complicated project.
We envision PopFactor as a go-to social media analytics platform for both average users and businesses. Social media has become a powerful tool for both personal and enterprise branding, and we hope to further the understanding of this important utility. Right now we would like to expand beyond color analysis, investigating our friend's impact on our photos using Instagram's tag your friends feature. With such information, PopFactor could determine which friends generate the most amount of likes when in a picture with you. In addition, we could expand to other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter.