Last month we launched a major new feature on the Eventful site --
Eventful Demand.
Ever wished that one of your favorite writers, musical artists, heroes, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, political figures, or other notable people would come to your town for some sort of event, be it a performance, or lecture, interview, panel session, or something? Eventful Demand is designed to help you make these "dream events" come about. It's not guaranteed to make the events happen, but it's a tool to help achive a sort of "tipping point" that triggers the event to come into being.
Here's a slide from the presentation made at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on March 8th where Eventful Demand was premiered:
With the Eventful.com site we are attempting to build a service that addresses all three dimensions of events -- those that are already "known" (i.e., scheduled and announced, and hopefully indexed by the EVDB engine, but not necessarily known yet to you the user), those that have not been scheduled or announced yet (and subsequently indexed by EVDB) but the user wants to know about as soon as they do get scheduled or announced, and finally, those events that users wish would happen, if only . . .
Background
First, some background on what this new Eventful Demand feature came about.
It was 1999 during the heyday of MP3.com. I was having a late dinner one night at a deli with three MP3.com engineering folks and we were brainstorming about new features we could add to the MP3.com site. We got to talking about a service where instead of having a "battle of the bands" (which is basically what the top 40 charts already were), we'd build a tool to support a "battle of the fans" where one city could "duke it out" with another city, escalating the bid for how much the fans would pay a particular band to come to their town and play. It'd be a sort of eBay for live music. Think about it: maybe fans in LA would bid $10,000 for some band to play, but then out of nowhere, the rabid fans of Fon du Loc, Wisconsin would pitch in together and surprise everyone with a $20,000 bid for the same band! If you were the band, what would you do? Damn straight, you'd play both places and collect $30k! :-)
Alas, the idea never jelled into an actual product on the MP3.com site, but I kept thinking about it over the years, occasionally blogging about it on my personal blog here and here.
When I dusted off the decade-old musicalert / lecturealert / bookalert business plan and turned it into EVDB, it occurred to me that the "battle of the fans" thing would fit perfectly into this new model. And so from the very beginning, the earliest vision statements for EVDB included a section on "demand aggregation", and how it could help bring extremely relevant events about that people really cared about.
I would have loved to have launched Eventful Demand a year or more ago, but we had higher priorities first, including building the underlying EVDB web services platform and getting the basics for "known" and "expected" events taken care of first. We're not done, not by a long shot, with features relating to those two dimensions of events -- one reason we're still applying the "BETA" moniker to the site.
But by late fall of 2005 it was clear we had to start planning to roll out the Demand service, and so we picked the end of February as a target release date. As luck would have it, we were invited to present at the San Diego User Experience SIG on Feb 28th, and we accepted the invite. The UX SIG meetings are wonderful: the invited company gets to show a new service to an audience of user experience, interaction design, and usability professionals, who proceed to ask lots and lots of questions whilst tearing apart the product. :-) The company then crawls back to its offices with a list a mile long of ideas for improving the product. Three big things we learned from the UX SIG experience: we weren't explaining sufficiently exactly what Demand was and how it worked; we were using a Wild West "WANTED poster" design motif way too much, to the point of alienating a nontrivial portion of the user base; and we were asking users to not only join a Demand for an event and specifying their email address, but we were also asking users to specify how much they would be willing to spend if this event comes about.
Just as we were nearing the Feb 28th date, another opportunity opened up, to present Eventful Demand, indeed, to premiere it, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. So we accepted that offer and pushed the release date to March 8th to coincide with the ETech launch. Smartest thing we ever did, as it gave us time to collect all the excellent feedback we got at the UX SIG meeting and actually make some substantial changes and improvements to the Eventful Demand product design (mainly simplification, simplification, simplification) before we shipped. The Wild West motif has been reduced to an optional design style on the Demand Sticker picker tool, and we eliminated altogether the requirement for users to indicate how much they'd be willing to spend to attend an event that came about from a successful demand.
The Launch.
So we launched on the morning of the 8th of March, at the Emerging Technology Conference. In my sheer brilliance, I forgot to plug the ethernet cable at the podium into my Powerbook, so here I am marching along giving the slides in the first half of the presentation, not realizing that I'm not actually connected to the Net. And, worse, not realizing that the Net connection is almost nonexistent. So when I did finally discover my blunder, in front of an audience of 1200 attendees, it wound up cutting into my allotted 15 minutes to the point where I was barely able to demo any of Eventful Demand. Last time that ever happens, that's for sure.
What was the very first Demand? Given we were launching at ETech, a geekfest if there ever were one, I figured it'd either be something geeky or something snarky. Well, it turns out it was snarky: a demand for Elvis to come out of hiding in Cuba of all places, and come to San Diego for a concert appearance. I was not amused, and the first thing I wanted to do was delete it. That would have been a dumb, dumb, dumb move. Luckily, lots of people made me reconsider. This was, after all, the marketplace, the community, speaking. How dare I not let them have their say? It was a useful lesson.
We're almost a month past the launch of Demand, and the Elvis demand now has 17 people signed up for it. Not quite earth-shattering. As I expected, it's reverted into obscurity. For, in the world of Eventful Demand, if you really really really want something to happen, it's entirely up to you to get the word out, far and wide. But even getting the word out, as far and wide as you can possibly get, is not enough. You have to get people to sign up. Lots and LOTS of people to sign up. But not just sign up. Sign up and then they each have to do the same: get the word out as far and wide as possible. So if we're ever gonna see Elvis perform live in San Diego (or anywhere else on Earth), we're talking about getting an awful lot of people to sign up, and getting the word out really really really far and wide. Who knows, maybe it might just work. :-)
(Of course, if Elvis was a surprise, who'd have thought the community would use Eventful Demand for political purposes.)
The Wil Wheaton Phenomenon
We were thrilled to see Wil Wheaton write about Eventful Demand on his very popular blog. Not only that, but he posted a Demand Sticker on his site, prominently featured in the right-hand column under a section heading of "HAWESOME". Here's what Wil had to say about what he called our "spiffy" new feature:
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This is an extremely cool and useful tool for performers and their fans, because it lets us all know where it makes the most sense to schedule an event. For example, right now there is a demand for me to come speak or read or set up a spectacular display of dominoes that displays the Fijian flag and launches a balloon at the end in San Diego. But what if you're not in San Diego? What if you're in Phoenix? What if you're in Chicago? What if you go to college in West Virginia? The cool thing Eventful lets you do is create your own demand, for your own area, and then share that demand (via e-mail or a blog, or an EAM or a complex series of rebus puzzles) with your friends from the same area, so they can join the demand. When enough people let an artist (or me) know that they're interested in a performance, or a demon-purging in their town, the artist (or snake handler) knows that it's worth his or her or its time and effort to come to your town. So what makes the "demand" thingy so cool is that fans can let performers know that there is a demand for them, and where that demand is. So if you want me to come bake bannana bread in Eugene, Oregon, but there's already a demand for me in Portland, make a demand of your own, and if Eugene ends up with more demands than Portland, guess where I'm taking my ultra-portable oven?
I've added an eventful demandy-thingy over there on the right side of my blog, which you can use to let me know if you want me to come to your town for a reading, or a flaming-moe-juggling, or maybe even a sketch comedy or improv performance. I haven't decided what the critical mass for me to come out is, and I suppose I'll cry bitter tears of defeat when no more than 15 people want me to come anywhere. Thanks for nothing! And to think I played my harmonica for you while we were on the rocket ship X-M!
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We couldn't have said it better.
Within minutes of Wil's blog post, the demands started popping up. Within 48 hours, he had demands in over 70 cities around the world. As of this writing, there are 869 people in 85 cities demanding Wil come to their town for some sort of in-person appearance / reading / skit / performance. Have you joined the demand for Wil?
End of Part One
Well, that's enough for Part One. Part Two of this blog post will follow shortly, with a detailed explanation of how Eventful Demand works -- for fans and for performers.
It's only been a week since we 
or a plus-minus button 
, on event detail pages, event search results, and various other places on the site, you'll now be able to export to Google Calendar via those buttons.
Other News: More Feeds
Hot on the heels of our 
But now, you'll also see an "Export to" feature added to the Add to / Remove From pop up panels -- which lets you export your selected event to other services. The first one we're making available is Rabble. So if you find something cool and want to add it to your Rabble account, you can now do that!