Networking tool for Instagram

Objective:

To develop an application for Instagram users which would allow to build chains of common acquaintances to celebrities, businessmen, politicians and people a user is interested in, establish business connections, and more.

Solution:

For successful project development we had to solve some complicated technical challenges.
For example, to implement the function of building the shortest route of acquaintances between two Instagram users in 30 seconds. Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t provide API to construct the way between two users and also limits the number of requests which can be made per unit time.
That’s why to complete this task we decided to make a separate service that processes all Instagram users over the range of possible id. As a result, the application provides the shortest chain search algorithm.
As known, Instagram has a plenty of bots and passive accounts. The main idea of the app is chain construction based on mutual subscriptions which required user check and filtration (of bots, online-shops, not real users etc.) realization.
The next task consisted in high system performance and maintenance cost as such calculations require significant computing power and correctly chosen data storage structure.
For the first app version we used DynamoDB, but during the development process we realised that this base didn’t allow to solve the task because of its architectural restrictions, so we made analysis of other opportunities and decided to use neo4. We also had some difficulties with this base, in particular with data transfer between the versions. Nevertheless, we managed to successfully solve this issue.
What concerns UI, there were a lot of customized UI components and complicated animation that required development from scratch. For example, octahedrons with progressive bars and the overall composition of elements on search screen.
The project development process took 7 months:
– Harvester development according to parsing of all Instagram profiles – 2 months.
– API development for mobile devices and admin interface – 1 month.
– Development of mobile applications – 2,5 months.
– QA and stabilization – 1,5 months.
Finally we created the app which builds chains of acquaintances to any Instagram user, conducts activity analysis and shows the most popular profiles.
The app enables users to:
– Build chains – the shortest route to any Instagram user
– Edit a built chain
– Delete participants from a built chain. The chain will be rebuilt without participation of remote users
– Look through and edit chains at any time
– Browse other users’ chains where you are a participant
– Save your chain as infographics
– Keep the infographics within the app
– Share your results with friends on Instagram
– Browse the 10 most popular users Browse the 10 most popular users
– Participate in contests and receive cool prizes

Result:

We made the project that met our customer goals. We created a powerful and modern application that differs by high-speed data processing and quality calculations performance.
We got great experience of work with API and data, profile analysis and complicated algorithms to chains construction.