Rafiqee means friend in Swahili. It was our submission at the Facebook University Hackday at Facebook, HQ on December 1st.
Concept
The idea was born at the CMU MHCI after observing students' work habits at the lab. The most difficult part of creative projects was seen to be coming up with good ideas, something that requires careful thought and many different perspectives. The students at the lab created mood boards, sketches, and affinity notes to communicate and iterate upon ideas based on feedback. Observing this, we thought that this process could be made easier by leveraging Facebook friends to answer and critique designs.
Rafiqee provides an interface to Flickr and Youtube. A person can post a question on a Facebook wall through Rafiqee, which then creates a new canvas for every question. These canvases are open to all collaborators who can then comment or add pictures/videos. This real time collaborative system is similar to Google Documents and uses long pooling for successful execution.
Data Sources
Facebook is used as a sign in mechanism on Rafiquee. Name and profile pictures are accessed using Facebook's Graph API. |
Flickr API Rafiqee uses the flickr API to search for photos based on tags. The photo search is provided as a convenience feature to communicate and answer questions. |
YouTube API In addition to the photos videos can be added to Rafiqee. The project uses the YouTube API for adding videos. |