Mashbot

Mashbot is an extensible marketing campaign manager for social media. Social media has brought the monetary costs of online marketing to an all-time low; however, the time to effectively manage a marketing campaign online has continued to grow with the proliferation of services and the high segmentation of internet users amongst different networks. Mashbot aims to reduce the challenges commonly experienced by those wishing to market their products or services online by reducing the amount of know-how, time, and effort required to reach your target audience online. Mashbot provides a unified interface to publish your updates, articles, blog posts, statuses, photos, etc. to your audience distributed across various social networks through a single tool.

Mashbot took third place in Drexel University’s Computer Science Senior Design competition, and is considered to have be pre-alpha, version 0.01, or a Minimum Viable Product (depending on your choice of lingo).

The software is divided into three primary components

1. a RoR-based frontend that allows creating/uploading content (status, posts, photos, etc.) and scheduling campaigns
2. a Java/Spring-based backend service for connecting to various service APIs (Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Tumblr, Blogger, etc.)
3. a Ruby-based connector that watches the user database and pushes scheduled content to the backend for distribution at the appropriate time while managing per-user service API credentials.

Cody was on a two-person team for the front-end, contributing to the models and controllers while the second-half of the team was responsible for developing the user interface and supporting logic. In particular, Cody was fully responsible for developing the user and API authentication subsystems for the various service APIs (OAuth, user/pass, proprietary APIs, etc.). He was also responsible for the connector component that runs independently, pushing scheduled content from the database to be distributed via the backend API service through the user’s own social media accounts, managing the user’s credentials for each push to the service APIs.