Show HN: Yet another (faster) way to discover events nearby

Mile wide, inch deep.

Or more like a millimeter. The problem in bigger cultural hubs is that people already know where to find event listings -- there are just too damn many. What they want to find is that narrow stream of events that match their taste. The key to that (if there is one) is probably a recommendation service similar to what YouTube offers, combined with social graph search. Which of course requires lots of data. Which is of course hard to get, unless you already have it. Which is why this problem is so dang hard.

But apart from a recommender service... an app which robustly shows events nearby could potentially be quite useful (often people don't particularly crave to do anything exciting on a given night -- they just want to go somewhere nearby with friends, and find out quickly whether the place they're going is hosting something they might like... or something they'd rather avoid). But I'm not sure your app does that well enough yet (at least after plugging in a certain popular but not overcrowded neighborhood in my city, then getting flooded with events very much in the center, and miles away).

Nice work!. Some UX feedback here, I'd make sharable urls more obvious. In detail:

- I enter to the website and I have to change the location and press "see events", this is ok.

- The page refresh and I get the events in my city, but the url is still https://etrigg.com Would be nicer if the url would have changed to https://etrigg.com/upcoming/berlin/ so I can share it.

I had to go to the footer to see how links to cities are made.

OK, I was skeptical of this before I looked at it (do we really need another way to discover events).

But I like what I see.

One peeve: why are webcasts and teleclasses included? I can't imaging a use case where these items will be searched for under an events website.

It looks like some of these are from meetup groups doing webcasts: http://www.meetup.com/supaproductpeninsula/events/228642272/

I would love it if there were a feature to exclude any event with the venue set as "online", "webcast", "on your computer" or some other things. Sure, I might lose visibility of some events, but I prefer to have fewer events that are highly likely to be actual "live", "real world" events than a bunch of events I have to search through.

tl;dr: the value prop is finding a bunch of live, real-world events, not online "events"

Hey, I'm Patrick - founder and dev of etrigg.com, a fast growing, lean and pretty cool event discovery start-up. It helps people to find events nearby pretty quick on any device w/ a browser (NO downloads, NO tons of ads, NO search, NO BS). Feel free to try it out and post feedback, thx :)

I don't understand why you're so down on yourself in the title? Yet another? What other ones are there? It's not like it's a saturated market. Like the options in my city (Nottingham) is pretty sparse. Leftlion event listings (poorly curated, filled with boring 'club' events and gallery shows that are listed every single day because they last months), experience nottinghamshire (seems broken) and skiddle (crap).

Be proud to get something done and out there! And finished!

I've always thought the big problem in these things is curation, like for me I'm just getting a random dump of stuff near by. Are you scraping this from facebook or something as the events seem ok, but I could see you getting overwhelmed by crap.

I think it needs a lot of love UX wise, look at this event for example:

https://etrigg.com/event/an-invitation-to-discuss-travels-tr...

At a glance, where the hell is it being hosted? Why did you put that at the bottom not the top? Why put a start and end time with dates? Why is there a category called 'Universal' in the page, if it's a catch all, don't display it.

The site is also almost entirely devoid of colour, it looks like a github page or something, not something fun to do with fun events.

Technically it seems good, but I think you need a lot more thought and prettying in the UX.

Impressive, and seems to solve the problem of "hat weird portal am I using today to see if anything is up around here". Still looks a little like a beta, but does all I want. Someone else mentioned shareable URLs would be nice, and I second this.

What is your method of adding events? Scraping Facebook events? Other random websites that show events, like virtualnights.com or so?

Edit: I see several dublicates for my city today (Bielefeld, Germany). I started checking since I saw that venues I like had two concerts today, and I thought, huh, they only have one stage, and saw it was the same, but labelled differently (Artist vs Tour name or so). So probably scraped from two websites that called it differently? Maybe this could be improved by comparing the venue and checking for similarity in the event name ("Iron Maiden - live" and "Iron Maiden on tour" might be the same event).

Observation: I'm sitting in my office in Orland Park, Illinois using my relatively new Macbook Pro. I followed the link and, as soon as I arrived at the page, I saw a dialog to choose my location. About a second later these choices vanished, the page assumed that I was Indianapolis, and I was shown a list of events in Indianapolis.

Since I got no popup asking for permission to share my location, I assume that you are using my IP address to geolocate me, and while that is definitely not a very accurate way to geolocate, its accurate enough to place me at least within one town of my actual location.

Verdict: You should work on your geolocation method immediately, or you should disable the feature for end-users until you have time to focus on it fully.

Interesting aside, it detects my location as "University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA", I'm on the University of Utah campus at the moment in the library so it's interesting location API's are that granular with the data.

It seems pretty cool though, I think it would be nice if events showed their price, but I imagine that's not here because it's not in the data getting scraped.

Good job! Love the simplicity. Current state of event discovery is rubbish and so fragmented across sites and categories of event. Just had a look at my home city (Edinburgh) and there's way more happening than I would guessed by browsing sites like Time Out, Resident Advisor etc.

Would be cool to show Meetups too, but that might pollute the space a bit too much in large cities.

Bookmarked!

This is pretty cool, but for a big hub like NYC, it isn't useful at all ... at least not for me.

I would need to at least easily set a far smaller location radius ... I'm in Brooklyn and my search results are dominated by a bunch of Broadway shows starting in 0h from now.

I would need to be able to easily set what time frame I'm looking at, because again, there's a zillion things starting at this moment.

And I would probably need a more granular filter on types of events.

But again, this is NYC, so it may not be an applicable set of issues in other regions.

edit: I read in the comments I can actually do some of those things once registered ... might want to make that a little more obvious on the initial UI? Also might want to set different default by region so it appears more immediately useful to a new visitor?

Overall, pretty cool.

I believe you might be getting facebook data which is fine but has the side effect that "styling" is lost. I.e. this

https://etrigg.com/event/agnes-biolum-koret-nelk-ertendo/518...

is somewhat terrible to look at, maybe you can keep the same proportions/styling it would have on the original site to make it feel better.

EDIT: not scraping, API calls

Excellent work. I've seen a lot of event sites and this one is the most concise and efficient. Seems to pull a lot of events! Would be nice if you could facebook integrate your friends events too.

I think you're getting the HN hug right now. Submitted a registration form never got the e-mail. I can't click any of the categories (like business for example). Changing the radius would be nice. Metric vs imperial for the 'muricans.

What is the date-range this is using? I am only seeing events for the next few days. Is it possible to expand into the future so I can make future plans?

Lots of interesting events in my area!

I made a similar app that shows you nearby events from your facebook "likes". I'd be interested to see what you guys think of it https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/eventual/id1016305409?mt=8

I am in Germany now. It is showing relevant events in the area. It really seems to work all around the world, I am impressed.

Looks nice. I would like to see more links to original sources, to find out what exactly the event is about. For example, the "Blackbird New York" events at this theater are not live music performances: https://etrigg.com/location/belasco-theatre-new-york-new-yor...

"Blackbird" is a Broadway play, but it took some searching to figure it out: http://www.newyorkcitytheatre.com/theaters/belascotheater/th...

I started something like that [1], making the scrappers for each websites started to get a little bit crazy and turned the meetup.com scrapper into his own project [2]

My final plan was to make this available as an configurable .ics so you can use Google Calendar. But with a big city the density of noise gets really big and it should also try to only recommends events that you may like and can go to...

[1]: https://github.com/mdamien/events

[2]: https://github.com/mdamien/scrapy-meetups

Really impressive. I thought of something like that some years ago, but aggregating events all around the world seemed a daunting task. Never went further as scrapping the site of a local free cultural agenda. Good luck!

I've seen tons of such websites, but they all have the same problem -- lack of content. How are you going to add/discover up-to-date events in tens/hundreds/thousands of cities? It's not feasible doing by hand, and organizers/users are not going to add events to every such website out there. I really hope you have some ingenious solution to this problem, because now, sadly, the best place to look for events is Facebook (that's the only reason I still have an account there).

I love the simplicity of your idea. Nice work! I'm also building an app to be released soon that also shows nearby events from facebook user likes and other sources. We're the most visited event guide at the moment in Portugal and expanding to Costa Rica (hoping to be soon in other countries as well) and the app will similar to our website. If you have a minute take a look - https://www.viralagenda.com

Saved this. I am looking at the DC listings, and I was immediately impressed that it had a lot of cool things that you wouldn't expect to find on a generic list. Nice work.

I love how simple it is.

Two feedbacks: 1) I'm in NYC, and my upcoming events are dominated by Broadway plays. Having some way to filter those out would be super helpful. 2) I only see events up to 7pm tonight (it's just after noon). I'm guessing you have this in the pipeline already, but getting to look at least a day ahead is pretty important for planning.

First of all, yay for native IPv6! :)

Just a nitpick: You're currently hosting the page through Hetzner, and as such on German servers. By German law you're required to provide a valid imprint/Impressum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum

Is this still somewhat a work in progress? I search music in Austin and nothing came back. That can't be right.

How should I use this product? I know there isn't much going on in my town, but I'm interested in events within, I don't know, 100 miles of me. Is it assumed that I should create an etrigg in those bigger towns within 100 miles of me, or is there some way to increase my care radius?!

OK, thanks to all your comments so far - I'm a bit overwhelmed by the feedback to this kind of "no-brainer idea" (love it) and I wanted to answer them all one by one but this site doesn't let me as it yells "commenting too fast" at me all the time :P

SO I'M GOING TO WRAP UP ALL PREVIOUS COMMENTS W/ THE FOLLOWING ANSWERS, HOPE IT WORKS:

0. SOLUTION: The one and only Idea behind that was "I want a list of events, NOW - nothing else". I even didn't what to "search" events - I just want them in a list regarding where I am now and what's up next. Period.

I too think all others fail at this and it sucks especially when being drunk, travelling or not always using FB to search for events (which sucks, too, I think) and so on. Of course the site is extremely limited and consider it still as a protoype (in version 2 now), but I love it having so as I don't need to spend much time on it to see what's goin'. I built the site primarily for myself and use it almost every day. It works well, here in Zurich, as I'm always on the hunt for interesting people or happenings (tech and non-tech). And it comes ultra-handy when travelling to other cities or countries.

1. MARKET: Now, it seems like there's A HUGE DEMAND on fast, lean, lovely and NO BS event discovery sites as the market still doesn't provide anything properly. So I got the impression I'm at least kind of on the right track in solving this issue and hope to be able to improve the site as much as I can to fit that need - would be awesome.

2. CONTENT: Most events come from other sites like FB, Eventbrite, meetup etc. via their APIs (funny, but none are scraped!). I implemented dozens of these APIs within the last 2 years and they mostly seem to work fine. The goal was to have a huge diversity and as much content providers on board possible. Actually due to legal restriction (copyright crap - on event info, LOL) this is only a fraction of what I wanted to have implemented, but we'll see ;)

There's also tons of individuals who sign up and post their own events (of any kind), which is cool and also subject to huge growth in the not so distant future.

Think how cool it would be having postings about happy hours for bars and restaurants etc. - like they mostly do only/mostly on twitter at the moment. These events are mostly too small for Eventbrite & co. as well as most FB stuff but have 'em here could lead to a whole new use case, for example...

3. CONTENT CATEGORIES: These are a bit different than on all the other platforms. The intention with this site was to provide ALL KINDS of events, so also stuff like e.g. transportation (flight plans, train scheudules), public (authority) events like "when comes the garbage man" or public holidays, tv schedules (mostly US + UK at the moment) - that's the "media" category or "business" as in trade fairs, weather etc...

So categories are here less what the event is about as more of what kind it is - e.g. there might be a congress about climate issuees what makes in mostly an educational, community or business event but not a weather event as the happening is not of kind "weather".

4. UX: Yes, it's lean, simple and fast. As some of you mentioned maybe a little too simple or not "loved" enough ;) That's currently the 2nd iteration + I'm not a great designer and I like things ultra-simple. I think I spent more time deleting code and appearances than the opposite (ok "physically" impossible but it felt like that). Might get better, I hope B-)

Also, most stuff is build around the browser view of e.g. an iPhone 4 - so 320 x 480px. I wanted everything being still good to use on all those smaller displays and that's what's the site mostly is built around.

5. EVENT DISCOVERY: Yes, there is an option to see far future events. But it's currently only when signed in with an registered account (needs only email + PW, though). Then you can select another "moment" (aka `from date`) and a different timeframe too. The account registration stuff comes due to the "trigg" feature where you can also "trigg" events/locations/searches, as in "subscribe to", and get notified by mail (simple implementation, gets better in the future).

And yes, it might get a bit crowded in some larger cities as the categorization of imported events is still not so good. Also I noticed that the content quality is one of the biggest issues to cope with when building such a platform. But it seems to get better over time and when you're getting used to category selection to filter in/out e.g. stuff you're (not) interested in at the moment.

I also thought about implementing "editor accounts" where people can (voluntarily, at first) add, curate or improve event information and throw own (etrigg sponsored/supported) events/parties - a bit like yelp did in it's early days - if there's anybody interested feel free to drop me an email (providers who want "go large" and others, too): mail@etrigg.com

OK, I think I'm posting in a few hours again as more comments arrive or maybe HN might let me comment on individual comments and doesn't consider it as spam or something ;)

Thanks a lot guys + keep sharing, you rock!

If any questions, suggestions or whatever else feel free to contact me at info@etrigg.com.

I like it. clean, simple useable interface. One issue I had: I couldn't tell if I was toggling something "on" or "off" in the top bar. Maybe it's just me, or the way my browser renders (FF).

Any type of rss feed available?

UPDATE: You now can set the radius (distance), moment (aka date from) and timeframe manually on the position page directly to improve your search without a user registration or being signed-in necessary anymore!

Have fun :)

Note that the founder can't reply to any comments at the moment because of new account limits:

https://twitter.com/etriggNews

Sounds like he will reply when he can.

It's a great start. Would like to see smaller venues listed here in NYC, of which there are thousands. Galleries, for example, often have events. Presently, there's no good UX that wraps all of them up.

Cool. I am surprised to see events in my not so densely populated area. Where are you getting them from currently? Also, is there some way to see them further out than just today/tomorrow?

Very quick, simple UI - I like it! Where do you pull the event data from?

Btw, you should look into adding a custom icon when bookmarking on an iphone. At the moment it just shows a screenshot of the page.

? Needs categories for "nerd", "robot", and "maker". Yet another product for the sheeple. sigh

Really nice and simple. I used Hoplr for this, but it has way too many bells and whistles. This is straightforward and I love it.

I like it but do you show past events? Sometimes I pass by a venue with a long lineup and I wonder who was playing there.

good job! this might still be relevant: http://www.jtoy.net/2009/09/11/events-idea.html

Where does it get its data? I'm getting "No events found.".

Now have two events booked for tonight :). Thanks, hope you keep it up.

interesting suggestions for orgies in my area. (berlin)

Awesome job. I hope you achieve great success.

Apparently there's nothing in DC? Hmph.

Is there a Map View or one upcoming?

Thanks.