December 30, 2005

Eventful Bot - Find Events via AOL Instant Messenger

This has been cooking around for a couple weeks here at EVDB -- Danny Markham's Eventful Bot, a delightful interface to Eventful using AOL Instant Messenger.

All you need to do is add "eventfulbot" as an AIM buddy, and then chat with her! Start by saying "Hello", and if you need help, just say "Help".

December 23, 2005

More News on Auto-Submit, and a Call To Action on SES

We've re-enabled support for Upcoming.org on our Auto-Submit feature. So if you want to create an event on Eventful.com and have it automatically posted to Upcoming.org as well, you can now do so again -- provided you have an Upcoming.org account.

We've implemented a de-duping capability using the Upcoming API -- so if you try to post an event on Upcoming and specify a venue that already exists on Upcoming, we do our best to use the Upcoming venue as opposed to create what would wind up being a copy of the venue. We've also implemented support for Upcoming's newly-released token-based authentication.

I'd like to thank everyone on the Upcoming team for the super responsiveness, cooperation, and overall willingness to work with us to make this happen. I hope we can continue to work together in achieve further levels of integration in 2006.

Along those lines, some thoughts, in the form of an open letter to all the companies in the emerging "event" space on the web:

One thing that's come out of this whole Auto-Submit experience is the clear need for an independent, web-wide standard way of publishing event data that is highly portable, highly detailed, and available to any aggregator that wants it. This goes beyond EVDB, or Upcoming, or Zvents, or any other company. The web still needs a totally open, portable way of letting any individual or organization announce their events to the world, enabling search engines and aggregators to help people find these events more readily.

We see two parts to the problem – notification, and choice of data container format.

In the blog world, we've seen blog software makers all cooperating on a ping API standard, meaning that whenever anyone posts a new article on their blog, it gets announced to ping servers automatically, enabling Technorati-style aggregator/search services to flourish, and, in turn, enabling blog discoverability to flourish.

This is what events need on the web. A way for event discovery to flourish through a widely adopted notification standard.

I'd like to see Upcoming, along with us, Zvents, and everyone else, publish public events to one or more ping servers that know how to deal with events, and let any other person or service subscribe to those ping servers.

The second part of the problem is an event data container format. The good ol' iCalendar format (RFC 2445) is one possible answer to this. This is the format that most calendaring apps use to externalize event data. But iCalendar has some drawbacks for public events; most notably, it has only minimal ability to represent location information. Through our participation in the CalConnect group, we're trying to eliminate these shortcomings. There are numerous other possibilities for event container formats, from microformats embedded in HTML documents, to RSS / ATOM, to brand-new XML formats.

We think the solution to the container format problem is to require that the ping message contain information about the format(s) of the available event data. This would allow the ping mechanism to continue to be used as event container formats evolve. In the interests of event discovery, having ping servers embrace multiple formats -- and letting the marketplace over time decide which it wants to use and which it doesn't -- is the best bet.

For a while the EVDB team has been kicking around an idea called SES, or Simple Event Sharing, which would be essentially something along the lines of what's described above. We already have the beginnings of a ping server. But there's lots more to do, and no one company is going to do (or own) it all. For all of this to work it needs to be open and something all the vendors agree to support.

Wanna work with us on this? I think it'd be a great project for us, Upcoming, Zvents, and any other events sites to achieve in 2006.

Let's do it!

December 21, 2005

World Jump Day

One of the more unusual events we've noticed in Eventful lately is WORLD JUMP DAY. The hope is, if enough people in the world (600 million give or take a few million) JUMP at a certain time next July, the Earth's orbit around the sun will be ever so slightly altered, but in a good way, honest!

Bogus science or the most brilliant thing since sliced bread, World Jump Day is guaranteed to be a hoot. According to the official web site, over 300 million people have already indicated "I'm Going!". Which is mind-boggling in its own right.

We're trying to do our part by spreading the word about this weird event. All you need to do is jump. Hopefully earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, meteor showers, and other calamities won't result. If the scientists are right, we'll fix global warming, have longer days, and everything will be peachy-keeno.

Remember to jump on World Jump Day!

December 20, 2005

And Yet Another Update on Auto-Submit

At the When 2.0 conference, where I'd officially announced our universal events submission feature, Ethan Stock had stopped by to congratulate EVDB on shipping such a feature. "We'd thought about doing that," he said.

Well, we shipped it. And then Yahoo/Upcoming complained, and we temporarily disabled support for automatically submitting events to Upcoming.org, at least until they could make some changes on their end and we could make some changes on our end (happily, work is progressing very well on that front and we hope to have Upcoming.org integration re-enabled soon).

And then the other day I got an email from Ethan asking us to voluntarily disable auto-submit to Zvents, at least until they could make some changes on their end, and we could make some changes on our end. (I sense a pattern developing.) And so, we complied, and for the moment, the Zvents checkbox is disabled as well as Upcoming. We hope to hear from Zvents soon with news that they've made the necessary changes on their end (we're already underway with changes on our end) so that the auto-submit feature works again and everyone's happy.

We continue to offer Auto-Submit to ping Technorati and Ping-o-Matic, as well as to submit a bookmark to Del.icio.us/events. Please note: if you intend to auto-submit an event to Del.icio.us, PLEASE be sure that you've tagged the event well. There's nothing worse, indeed, I would consider it a "web sin" if there is such a thing, to submit a bookmark to del.icio.us that does not have tags for people to find it.

As a general rule, I find that any event one adds to Eventful should have at least 5 good, solid tags that describe what this event is. Probably two or three tags just to describe what type of event this is, and some then to describe the people or topics or other things that make this event particularly notable.

Finally, keep sending us suggestions on where you'd like us to also auto-submit events. We're talking to a number of places and expect to have more places to submit to soon!

December 19, 2005

Second Life Events now in Eventful

At the Web 2.0 conference I ran into an old RealNetworks colleague from years earlier, Philip Rosedale, who these days helms Linden Lab, makers of the Second Life (hereinafter SL) online role-playing game / alternate world.

I told him what I was up to with EVDB, and mentioned how intrigued I was to learn that there were events going on in SL. I'd found out about this because of Cory Doctorow's "personal appearance" in SL and then a little later, author Thomas P. Barnett's event in SL.

Phil told me there were something like four hundred daily events all over Second Life, and sure, he'd love for us to index them! So, we made arrangements to do so and presto, Second Life events are now flowing into the EVDB platform and the Eventful.com website.

Here's a handy link to see what's going on in Second Life at the moment. So far we've indexed over 1600 events in December alone! There's all kinds of things going on in that other world...

One thing to note on the event detail pages for Second Life events. You'll notice that one of the links says "Second Life link:". This is the link with a special url, beginning with "secondlife://", which if you've installed Second Life on your Mac or PC, should tell your browser to launch SL and "teleport" straight to that "venue" -- the location within the SL world. Very handy!

December 15, 2005

Update on Auto-Submit feature

An update to the recent launch of our universal events submission tool, Auto-Submit, which enables you to submit an event to Eventful and then have it also automatically get submitted to other services, includng Zvents and Upcoming.org.

One of the services we plugged into, Yahoo's Upcoming.org, has decided to (at least temporarily) block events being submitted automatically by the Eventful service. They cite two main reasons:

• The potential for duplicate events and venues being submitted, thus diluting the value of their data.
• Events submitted to Upcoming.org are submitted to an "evdb" user ID, which we created, on the Upcoming service. Upcoming doesn't like this; they would prefer events submitted by the user's real Upcoming user ID.

So let's look at these issues one at a time.

The Deal With Dupes.
Nobody likes duplicate events or venues. It lowers the quality of the database, and it clutters up search results. You see two or ten venues all named nearly the same thing, and you think, why are there so many? Worse, you think, which is the right one? It's messy. So, the goal is to avoid dupes as much as possible.

When we auto-submit an event to Upcoming, we do so using their API. It turned out that the Upcoming API didn't quite provide enough detail to determine if a venue was a duplicate or not. However, we learned this week that they've updated their API and it should be possible to do a fairly good dupe check before actually submitting the event. So we're planning to change our code a bit, using their API functionality, and hopefully the likelihood of dupes will be lessened.

The Deal with user IDs.
Upcoming doesn't like us submitting events into a single user account on their service, particularly an account named "evdb" :-) We did this for a reason. If we'd not done this, then each Eventful user who wanted to auto-submit to Upcoming would have to have TWO things -- 1) an Upcoming user ID and password, and 2) an Upcoming API token. We figured it was very unlikely that a non-technical user would even know what an API token was, let alone have one or know where to get one. The API token requirement seemed to us to essentially kill the idea of event sharing across independent services and systems.

Upcoming has responded to this issue by adding a new set of functionality called "token-based authentication", similar to something available on Flickr's service. We're studying this new functionality now and will post an update to the blog here when we've figured out how to support it on our end.

In the meantime, we're going to disable Upcoming on our end inside the Add Event form, until we hear from Upcoming that they've lifted the ban on their end. Hopefully this will be in a few days.

More details to come.

---

UPDATE - 12/16/05, 2:46pm
Andy Baio of Upcoming.org AIMed me with some comments on the above post. Here are his comments:

1. We've never blocked the "evdb" user. You can add events now, as you could before. We just won't show your events in public metro pages until the problems you've acknowledged are fixed. 2. You never needed separate API keys or tokens. One API key for all EVDB users is perfectly fine, and you could have passed in username/password before. The token-based auth is just a more secure way of doing this. 3. Duplicate venue checking was available before using two API calls, but we agreed it was easier to have it in a single call and fixed that for you guys.

So, events submitted by Eventful users are not "blocked" on Upcoming, per se, just hidden unless you specifically search for them. They don't show up in the Metros event lists, which is one of the more common ways an Upcoming user can see what's going on in a metro area. We hope to have that issue resolved soon.

What's great is that there is a lot of dialog going on between EVDB and Upcoming right now, to resolve the technical issues. Stay tuned, we should have some more news in a few days.

December 06, 2005

New: Auto-Submit Your Event to Other Websites

We've heard from customers over and over again that "it sure would be helpful if there were a way to submit an event to multiple sites using a single service." So we went and built such a service! We've added a new feature inside the "Add Event" form that should come in really handy when you're trying to promote an event on multiple websites: Auto-Submit.

With Auto-Submit, you can optionally request Eventful to automatically submit your event to the following websites (we'll be adding more in the future):

• Upcoming.org


• Zvents


• del.icio.us/events

plus, we will "ping" the following blog ping servers:

• Technorati


• Ping-O-Matic

How to Use Auto-Submit
Create a new event as you would normally do so, with the "Add Event" form. At the very bottom of the form is a new checkbox:

It only appears for public events -- if you designate your event as private, the Auto-Submit feature is disabled.

If you check the checkbox, then when you click the "Add Event" button, you'll see a new form:

This is where you can designate what sites should be notified about your new event. Note that when you arrive on this page, the event has been created on Eventful. This page lets you designate where else besides Eventful this event should go.

Be sure to specify a venue (be as detailed as possible -- type in the full address, city, state, postal code, country, etc) if you intend to auto-submit this feature to Zvents or Upcoming.org. Eventful will check to make sure a venue's been specified (if one hasn't, it won't let you submit to those sites).

This is an experimental feature. Please use it carefully and respect the policies of the other sites when submitting events. Please, no spam or abuse of the feature.

One last thing: You'll note on the Submit form above, there's a suggestion box on the right side of the page. This is where you can tell us of other sites you'd like for us to add the Auto-Submit feature to.

Be sure to let us know what you think of this new feature and how we can make it better!

New: "When" search

We've added a "When" search along with the "What" and "Where" on the Events tab of the site. So, now you can form a complete query including specifying the time-frame for the events you're interested in. For example, you might say "lecture" for the What, "new york" for the Where, and "tomorrow" for the When. That'll tell the system to search for lectures in New York that are happening tomorrow! You can also specify an actual date, or day, or month. Try it out and let us know what you think!