Slaywoke
A location-based social network for meeting new people at schools and universities
Our client’s idea
When Eric Llanos was a student, he spent lots of time connecting with his friends on Facebook and Myspace. In those days, these sites targeted a young audience. But things have changed. Myspace has gone out of business, and Facebook is getting popular among older users.
So where do students hang out now? Eric analyzed Instagram and Messenger and found that Instagram isn’t suited for texting, while Messenger isn’t comfortable for sharing files.
He and his team surveyed high school and university students and discovered they had difficulty finding friends at new schools and universities using existing social apps.
Eric approached Steelkiwi with an idea to build a social network to help American students adapt to a new place and make friends quickly. He understood that the market for social media platforms is large and competitive. That’s why he wanted his platform to stand out for its ability to find users nearby, browse profiles, chat, and meet people offline.How Slaywoke works
The main purpose of Slaywoke is to show nearby users and display posts by them. To get started with Slaywoke, you have to sign up for an account, create a profile, upload a photo, and set your location. Once registered, you can view the profiles of other users who are within 3,000 feet (a little under a kilometer), add them as friends, chat with them, and arrange a meeting offline.
Results
To get the Slaywoke MVP out the door fast, we suggested using the cross-platform Flutter framework. It allowed us to save time on app development since we could write code once and run it on both Android and iOS. This allowed Eric to test his idea on both Android and iPhone users.
Our client’s designs were inspired by one of the first versions of Myspace.
Slaywoke users can access core functionality using a tab bar at the top of the screen that has radar, newsfeed, following, messages, profile, and notifications buttons. At the bottom, there are subfeatures of the radar: a list of people nearby and their public posts.
Another interesting solution is fields on the left side of the screen that enable users to enter text when registering and creating a profile.
The logo of the app is a pink lion with a blue rose.
We needed to display nearby users on a dynamic map with a radar overlay. Google Maps seemed like the perfect option, but at the time Flutter didn’t offer full support for Google Maps, meaning we couldn’t change the color scheme and customize markers. We decided to work around this by building these features from scratch. Today, Flutter already offers full support for Google Maps, so this is no longer a concern for new apps.
Implemented features
Users can create profiles, set their location, upload a profile picture, and add information about themselves. They can follow other people, chat, and block users. Additionally, users can publish posts, check out their newsfeed, and get notifications.
Users can message with their friends in private chats. They can also view their friends’ private feeds.
Users can publish posts, view posts of other users who are within 3,000 feet, and interact with these posts within 48 hours.
The app provides users with a radar that shows people within 3,000 feet, who are displayed as glowing indicators on the map.
Users can explore other areas using the SW radar by typing in the name of any city or country to find other Slaywoke accounts.
Technology Stack
