Earlier this year (06/05 to 07/05), Nathan Malishev, Josh Parnham, Daniel Sykes-Turner, and I attended the Facebook Melbourne Hackathon — located in Facebook’s beautiful, and brand new, Melbourne office.

Our team, ‘Moji’, ended up taking home first prize — a trip to San Francisco to compete in the Facebook Global Hackathon finals.

We built an end-to-end product, moji.cool, consisting of a dashboard, a Chrome extension and an embedable widget, which allowed end users to react to any web page they come across.

By hacking all of these together, we effectively built for two demographics: the end users, and website owners who might want to gauge reactions to their sites and pages.

The idea was to take what Facebook has done with their reactions but allow anyone to react to any website. The embedded version is similar to Disqus’ comments or the Facebook 👍 button; you embed it and anyone who visits your site can use it. The Chrome extension adds this functionality to all websites you visit and allows you to react to them by simply hovering over the reaction bar.

As with most hackathons, our idea evolved pretty quickly once we started implementing it, so we ended up adding live visualisations of reactions as users interacted with the page, in the form of a stream of emoji following a randomised sin wave (thanks to Daniel). Here it is in action:

I think we did a fantastic job, well done team Moji! 🎉

A huge thank you to Daniel and Josh for proof reading this!