Milo - The Next Generation Social Media
Milo is a location based web and mobile application that allows users to make posts, events and blurbs specific to the radius from their current position. You choose how far you want to reach.
Created on 25th July 2021
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Milo - The Next Generation Social Media
Milo is a location based web and mobile application that allows users to make posts, events and blurbs specific to the radius from their current position. You choose how far you want to reach.
The problem Milo - The Next Generation Social Media solves
Milo is a social network with feature-sets for posts, scheduling events, broadcasting promotions - all location-based, so you only get what truly matters. There is something for everyone! We aim to solve the problem of social reach for the users where they have the control. In-line with the agenda, Milo offers a lot with endless applications!
Posts:
A post can be in the form of a notice or an announcement where readers can comment on them. This helps to spread the word across faster. Posts would be deleted automatically after 24 hours, thus saving resources and also avoiding unnecessary dubiety regarding the content.
Hashtagged Content
Hashtags can be given to posts and a user can find content based on thier choice of hastags. This helps to provide cotent as wanted by them. It also helps to classify the posts.
Events:
Events are where users can see what their locality is upto. Maybe a blood donation camp, a volunteer drive, a meet-up to get to know each other or simply a football game this weekend in the park - Milo has you covered. This helps people spread the word faster, increasing engagement and also helps improve their social network. User can create an event and everyone can comment on the same. Events won't be visible once the event date passes.
Blurbs:
Blurbs are your promotions - for local vendors, side-husltes, professions, etc. It aims to aid people who want make their product public. Users can provide feedback and ratings to evey Blurb. Blurbs therefore act as a one-of-its-kind distance-based marketplace.
So go ahead, engage with the community. Be active, take initiatives and encourage creativity. All with Milo!
Challenges we ran into
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Firstly, we ran into the problem of how exactly do we determine the distance of 2 co-ordinates or even how to get those 2 co-ordinates. With a fair bit of testing and researching - we came across the Haversine Technique for the calculations while learnt of the in-built libraries for accurate location.
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We initially had thought of using Deta for microservices, database and storage. Unfortunately in the middle of the project we found just how large the latency is for retrieval and storage of media files. We had to therefore shift our back-end storage to Firebase. Further, we realised how little documentation exists about Firebase for Python. Eventually, devling into the Pyrebase source code, we were able to change the storage without changing the API endpoints or the backend structure.
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We had aimed to build a surreal and memorable UI for Milo. The constantly updating background, the glassy look were all part of the design. It took a lot of dabbling for us into CSS, Bootstrap, Material UI, react-loaders and many more to reach here. You may still find some lingering bugs in image alignment and placement. Rest assured, we shall rectify them in the future.
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None of us had used Multipart-Form to upload files through the API. It took us a while to research and implement the same in the project.
Technologies used