New Tab Hangout - Chrome Extension

Caveat

This is one of my favorite personal projects. However, I documented it sooooo poorly 💔 It takes a bit of extra effort to figure out what's going on. Thanks for understanding.

-> I explored... how could I "bump into" friends on the web?

New tab hangout is a chrome extension that explores... well... what if we could "hang out" in new tabs?

One of my favorite parts of college was running into friends in the hallway going from class -> class. But then because of quarantine, I was forced into quarantine and taking all of my classes online. I was on my web browser an INSANE amount each day. And I craved just "bumping" into my friends.

And eventually I realized, the repetition of traveling from website -> website felt similar to traveling from class -> class. And then I had the unlock that the "hallway" of the web was the new tab page.

• In person college: class -> hallway -> class
• In the browser: website -> new tab page -> website

So, I made a new tab page chrome extension for about 6 of my friends. Whenever any of us were on it, we could see the other person's cursor. And clicking could send ripples to them.

It was a fun experiment... and I really did "bump into" friends when we had this installed. It was delightful to see that someone else in the internet ether was *also online at the same time you were.

System Design

Framework: Google Chrome extension
Frontend: p5js
Backend: Flask, Websockets
Database: SQL
Hosting: Heroku