November 23, 2005

New Feature: Eventful Groups

We're rolling out Eventful Groups today - a new feature for people to form groups of similar interests, hobbies, etc., or groups for organizations, teams, companies, families, etc. With groups, numbers of people can collaborate on adding events to calendars.

Some major features of Eventful Groups:

• Adding Groups: You can create any number of your own groups by simply going to the Add Group form and creating a new group. Groups have a name, an optional image, a description, tags, privacy settings (public, private, or limited to friends/family/contacts), and the ability to specify "What" and "Where" keywords for the group. With the latter, the system will automatically search for events that match those "What" and "Where" criteria, and populate any results into the grop's list of events.
• Group Search: When you click on the Groups tab, you can search for groups right at the top just like with other tabs.
• Browse All Groups: There's also a Browse All Groups button which lets you see all the groups that users on Eventful have created, along with the number of events in that group and the number of members.
• My Groups: If you've created or joined any groups, you'll see a box on the left-half of the Groups tab page that lists these particular groups that are of interest to you. If you happen to be the owner of the group, you'll see a little gray word "Admin" next to those group names.
• Recently Added Groups: On the main Groups tab page, you'll also see a box (on the right-hand side of the page) listing groups that have been recently added to the system. This is a dynamic list that gets updated every few minutes.
• Group Info page: Each group has an Info tab with information about the group, including description, tags, links, privacy, and a list of comments members have posted.
• Group Events: Essentially the calendar of events for a group. Right now any group member can add events to a group's list of events.
• Members list: Every group has a list of members.

• Group Invite: Every member of a group can send invites to other Eventful users (friends, family, contacts, or other users) as well as send email to non-Eventful users, inviting them all to join the group.
• Group Edit: If you're the owner of a group, you can edit its attributes by clicking on the Edit link.
• Joining or Leaving Groups: Fast and easy. Find a group you'd like to join? Just click on the "Join this group" button. Want to leave a group you're already a member of? Just click on the "Leave this group" button.
• Converting Calendars to Groups: If you already own a calendar or SmartCalendar, you're going to notice a new button on your calendar info page: you can now "Convert" a calendar to be a group! If you do it, there's no way to revert back, so only convert if you really want to. The advantages are, people can join your new group and anyone in your group can contribute events to the group's list of events, so it becomes a collaborative effort.

We hope you'll try out the new Eventful Groups feature and let us know what you think.

November 21, 2005

Improving Search Even When There Are No Matches

When you search for events on Eventful, it might happen once in a while that there are no results that match your search criteria. For instance, maybe you search for "rodeo" as the "What", and you type in "San Diego" as the "Where".

I just tried it, and right now I don't see any rodeo events in San Diego.

We've improved the page that tells you there aren't any events that match. Instead of just saying, sorry, no matches, you're out of luck, we try to provide you with a whole bunch of options.

Here's what the new "no results" page looks like:

Search Tips
The first thing we suggest are some tips to improve your search: Make sure all words are spelled correctly; Try different keywords; Try a different location. For the last one: the idea is, go broader, especially if you've typed in a zip code. If you live in a big metro area, just type in "Chicago" or "Seattle" or "San Diego" instead of, "Chicago, IL" or "Seattle, WA" or "San Diego, CA". It actually makes a difference -- we treat the former versions as "metro areas" and the latter versions as specific cities. So, "Chicago, IL" might not include events in Evanston or Skokie, while "Chicago" might get 'em.

Alert Me
Note the new green "Alert Me" box. This lets you create a "Smart Calendar" with the search you were attempting to make, in this case, "rodeo" in "san diego". So by clicking "Set Alert", we take you to the form for creating a new Smart Calendar, with the "rodeo" prepopulated in the "What" field, and "san diego" prepopulated in the "Where" field of the form. You can then specify that you want to be notified via email when matches occur. Who knows, some day there just may be a rodeo event in San Diego!

Subscribe to this search
Even simpler than creating a Smart Calendar is simply clicking on the "RSS" or "ICAL" icons for this search and subscribing to the search. What does it mean to "subscribe to a search"? It means Eventful will continue to do this search for you each time your RSS newsreader software, or your iCalendar-compatible calendaring software request updates. Sometimes this is called "prospective search" or "searching the future" -- it may be that right now there are no results, but you're hoping there will be some some day, and you want to find out about it right away.

Alternative Searches
In the right column, we also provide some other suggestions, for instance, a section called "You might also want to try these searches" offers searches for "rodeo" only (and guess what, the system found 114 results!) and "san diego" only (almost 1000 results).

Calendar Search Matches
We also try to find any calendars that somehow match one or more of your search terms. In the example above, note all the "San DIego" calendars that popped up.

The main thing is, it's not the end of the world if you don't find any results when you do a search. Events are being scheduled and announced all the time; it may be that the thing you're looking for simply hasn't been announced, or hasn't been entered into the system yet. By using either Smart Calendars or the RSS/ICAL prospective search subscriptions, you can put the Eventful system to work for you: it'll continue to search so you don't have to.

We'd love to hear from you on ways we can improve further this small but very important page on the site.