Millifeed

For PennApps Hackathon Winter 2017, my team made two Facebook chatbots that together allow anyone with Facebook Messenger to setup a micro-blog using a single chat message. Suppose you are running an event and want to send people updates. An event organizer can setup a blog by chatting the Millifeed Admin Bot “create myevent”. When people enter the door, you then tell them to chat the Millifeed Bot “myevent” to subscribe. At this point, the organizer can send messages/images/GIFs to all subscribers without a) ever collecting their contact information, or b) ever requiring the guests to download a new app (assuming they use Facebook Messenger).

The two chatbots run on a Node.js server. I wrote functions to interact with the database (MongoDB), and my teammates used these functions to configure the bot. We didn’t publish the bots.

The first screenshot shows someone chatting the setup bot to create a new micro-blog called “pandas”. The second one shows someone subscribing to that blog.

Code is here: https://github.com/mgriley/subscribe_bot