
Why do event sites suck? - toisanji
http://jtoy.net/2009/09/11/events-idea.html
======
neilk
I used to work for Upcoming.org. Yes I know about the location bug and way
more besides. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do about it any more.

You're missing the bigger picture. Forget about tight calendar integration and
blah blah, that's a nice to have, and reasonably easy compared to the bigger
problems.

Event sites suck because they never have most of the events you want to go to.
And without some fundamentally new way of learning about events, they never
will.

Events sites are trying to do something a lot harder than the typical Web 2.0
startup. They are trying to build an accurate and _complete_ picture of the
real world, with a constantly shifting time horizon of about a few weeks, out
of relatively apathetic users and very flaky and fragmented and non-
technologized players (promoters, fans, etc.).

Contrast that with say, a photo hosting site. The assets at a photo hosting
site are all-digital, last for years and constantly accrue new visitors. If
you uploaded a photo to Flickr in 2005, it's still making money for them
today, one way or another. It's also still garnering the user comments and
page views, giving them some love at the same time. You have no expectation
that Flickr should have _all_ the photos you want to know about, just that
there be enough good ones.

Your idea of autodiscovery via microformat already exists (hCalendar) but good
luck getting others to use it. There are several startups which tried natural
language parsing to grok events from the web but none came close to
succeeding. The best method might be to reuse calendar entries, and Google's
made some efforts in this direction.

Anyway, all the above problems seem to confine event startups to, at best,
becoming authoritative for certain local scenes. None have ever taken off and
just become authoritative even for an entire city, or a music category across
cities. The only ones who are winning are just pouring money into the problem,
sucking up event data from a variety of commercial sources. So far there's no
real community solution to this problem.

~~~
thetrumanshow
Yes neilk, awesome. Let me also add...

I am not convinced that very many people care about discovering new events in
the first place, at least not events that don't have an immediate impact on
one's social status. People learn about most events from their friends or
their existing communities. This should not seem strange because people become
friends with one another (or join communities) through having aligned
interests. This solution seems optimized already. I don't think you can beat
it, or at least not in a way that creates enough value to justify a standalone
"event community". Does it hit home that you, OP, may be essentially trying to
create a community around people with the common interest of "We like to
attend events"?

Ah, but you say: "Well, the key value will be that people will link to their
friends and they will interact around the events that they will attend
together. We're covered." Indeed, this is usually listed in the first set of
bulleted features people start whiteboarding:

    
    
      Idea #27: Let's Build an Event Site!
       * Aggregate all events from everywhere... except recurring Sunday church services, random unknown people's birthday (who published their private event as public), and dozens of guys who are making up interesting-sounding events just trying to do lead generation for their Quixtar, TEAM, etc get-rich-using-something-similar-to-a-pyramid-scheme-but-we-swear-its-not-a-pyramid-scheme group.
       * Let people pick what events they are interested in and add them to their 'list'.
       * Let people invite their friends to use this service too and they can link up their profiles as "friends" in the system. (awesome, we're viral!)
    

...

At this point in the bullet-list, OP, someone needs to state the obvious
(either you or your co-founder) and suddenly say, "Well, can't they just use
email to invite friends to events?" ... then the both of you can avoid going
down this path and focus on problems that people actually have and are willing
to pay you to solve.

Ah, and I just have to mention that no one really cares that much about
calendars either. It is exceptionally rare that people use them outside of
work. And really, if you are employed at a major corp, you can't very likely
import your schedule for your wild week at Sturgis into your work calendar.
Some people frown on knowing the tacky aspects of your life outside of work.

~~~
marram
"""I am not convinced that very many people care about discovering new events
in the first place, at least not events that don't have an immediate impact on
one's social status."""

My definition of an event is: A social gathering of my friends, or friends of
friends. I don't care about random trivia nights, but I might check them out
if my immediate friends are going to them.

I believe that an "event community" is a misguided notion. Going to the same
event as a perfect stranger is not a strong enough context for socialization.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
* Going to the same event as a perfect stranger is not a strong enough context for socialization*

People who have just moved to a new place do a lot of that, soon they get a
new peer group. Finding the right events is easier than it once was with
online tools, but still not trivial.

------
toisanji
I think this could be turned into a startup. thoughts?

~~~
byoung2
I think it's definitely a good idea...the hurdle you would face is getting the
data. Maybe the existing event sites thought of spidering data but were
unsuccessful. How would you do it differently?

~~~
fizx
The event-scraping problem has motivated a year of technology development on
my part. Parsley, Parselets, date_range, csvget, SelectorGadget, and a bunch
of unreleased niftiness.

I've mostly moved on from the problem, but would be happy to talk to anyone
who's interested, share my experience, etc.

~~~
toisanji
I'd definitely like to hear more about your experiences. I couldn't find your
email address in your profile, mine is jtoy at jtoy dot net

------
jpwagner

      "I think a spider should be employed that searches 
      the web for events and adds them into the database."
    

Everything but _this_ has been done "well".

If you can do this you can make money, but I don't think it's so trivial...

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes, Yes, Yes

Organizing time-based items is much less trivial than people imagine...

And there is less immediate bang for succeeding than other search spaces. And
determining if, say, recurring event is still recurring two months after it is
first posted is tricky.

------
marram
Have you see <http://www.thesponty.com> ? (disclaimer: I'm co-founder)

It's has elements of Twitter, but is built specifically for casual social
events. Sponty gives users a way to broadcast their social intentions, like
"Lunch in Harvard Square", where all their friends are implicitly invited.

In addition, Sponty tries to answer two questions: 1\. What are my friends
doing today? obviously this doesn't work right away ... you need to have some
friends on it first.

2\. What are other's doing in Boston/network today? We show you all the public
events people have posted in a given network:
<http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston>

We're trying to crowd source the answer to this question, because crawling is
too hard and too inaccurate. Also, most of the really interesting stuff cannot
be crawled.

One more: We categorize events by icons. For example, here are beer related
events in Boston today: <http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/beer>

or music: <http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/music>

~~~
whalliburton
Nice. Any chance for an API?

~~~
marram
We have a json API that we're using to implement an iPhone version. Open up
Charles (an HTTP proxy/monitor) when using Sponty, the web interface almost
directly uses the API as well.

------
bemmu
I have this problem too, I want to find tech events, and when I ask for them
people always point me to meetup.com, which I often have to leave
disappointed. I just feel like I cannot trust that it really has the events I
might be interested in, often I am able to find more by googling and asking
around.

For example I trust Orbitz/Kayak to find nearly any flight I might care about
(as long as it is not in SE asia), but there is no such site where I could
search for events and not feel like I might be missing out on something.

I was thinking of this could be built, but figured I must be in some sort of
minority. I assume not many people are willing to travel long distances just
to attend tech events, and if they are local events, maybe you know about them
already.

------
fizx
I wonder if making a good events site is equivalent to being able to create a
personalized filter for large, noisy streams of information (Not just events..
I'm looking at you, Twitter).

I can't be bothered to sift through the damn noise on upcoming, etc.

~~~
joe_the_user
Good point.

This filter _might_ be a search engine but I actually have other ideas on this
front...

------
lsb
Songkick.com is an events site, for live music events around the world, and
they're awesome. They've even got a plugin for iTunes to recommend you gigs
based on what you listen to.

(I no longer work there, but their product looks better than ever.)

~~~
jrg
yet its data frequently seems to be wrong, for anyone looking at a particular
city who knows the venues.

So if they can't get it right, for a limited scope of live music events, it is
clearly as tough to get right as others say it is.

------
matthew-wegner
I have an iPhone. It knows where I am. I would definitely swing by random bar
meet-ups if my iPhone told me there was one that matched my interests going
down _right now_ , four miles away.

Also, when I run my own event--via evite or whatever--for god's sake, I want
to be able to mass-SMS my attendee list with a single click. It's impossible
to broadcast last minute changes except via text message or phone call.

~~~
saliem
I'm surprised that upcoming et al haven't done this yet. I might expect this
from Yelp, but they released an iphone application and it didn't even include
their events section.

------
hans
Just thinking the other day how there are too many event sites, which implies
they all suck b/c none have really nailed the feature.

Upcoming sux as well, not to mention it constantly defaults to the wrong
location even tho my yahoo profile spells it out.

Another thing: too much about "bands playing" which drowns out all event
lists, put bands in a folder, offer other categories ...

------
olefoo
Have you had a look at <http://calagator.org/>

It's mostly focused on Portland tech events at this time, and I don't know how
well it would scale up, it's also not a business, it's provided as a service
to the community which means it's not operating under the same constraints you
would face as a startup.

------
jhancock
"To solve the problem of inaccurate data, I think a spider should be employed
that searches the web for events and adds them into the database."

Could a microformat handle the job of tagging an event and let google do the
walking? Maybe you could build a startup to organize a portal after that, but
can you really crawl better than the big crawlers?

------
CodexMuse
BuzzInTown.com is an example of digital traction in a highly analog
ecosys/geo. In combo w/ say CitySense (iPhone & B'berry app) that implicitly
offers interest-based segmentation along spatio-temporal lines and an
intelligent calendar app like LuckyCal, we may be on our way to an elegant,
albeit cobbled-together solution.

------
dahius
We are working on this problem! Coming soon :)

<http://activity.fm>

~~~
peoplerock
Sorry. Not finding it inviting to see on your home page only a logo and "Sign
up for the launch to be aware!"

You expect me to provide _any_ sort of email - with no statement of company
mission, target audience, benefits claimed?

Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect any email addresses.

~~~
dahius
Thanks for your comment! We haven't expected that visitors may feel in the way
which you pointed out. We will fix the misunderstandings and get the beta as
soon as possible.

------
aplusbi
On a somewhat related note, if you make a website for a specific event on the
top of the first page, clearly visible, you should have:

* The date and time of the event

* The event location

* Price

* Any other relevant information (dress-code, what to bring, etc) or at least a prominent link to said information

~~~
sheriff
I totally agree that a lot of sites fail to get the most important info front-
and-center.

I recently started building <http://minivite.com> to address that problem.

------
patio11
Why would I need a dedicated event site to find where Rubyconf is this year
when I know, to a moral certainty, that Googling [rubyconf] will give me that
answer on the first result?

------
joe_the_user
_Meetup.com has lots events that I’m interested in, but they only store their
own meetups and not all events._

Uh, that doesn't qualify as "sucking"!

------
Husafan
If I know the name of an event I'm looking for, I just Google it. They have a
"spider."

------
jrwoodruff
has there been any talk of (or is there) an open, xml-based event markup
structure? It seems like if there was a widely adoped standard tagging for
event data implemented, all kinds of great things could happen in this space.

~~~
fizx
hCal+hCard Upcoming implements it.

