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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook events is one of the only things keeping a lot of people I know on facebook.

But, yeah, it's hard to go to something else cause of the friction.

What we really need is something that is as integrated into fb events as fb, but _also_ allows people who aren't on fb to find and keep track of and RVSP to events.

I think facebook API's don't really allow you to have that kind of integration for a third-party thing though. I would assume this is intentional.

(I find out about a lot of events on fb not by searching for events, but by facebook timeline telling me "your fb friend is interested/going to this event. If you can figure out a way to approach that kind of experience with your non-fb thing, it might help).

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> Facebook events is one of the only things keeping a lot of people I know on facebook.

Yeah, it's true for me. I barely use messenger anymore (married the person I wrote the most with), and even then I use it via Trillian. I open facebook maybe 2-3 times per week to check events and that's it. But with all their crappy UX, events is still better than alternatives to see what friends are doing and what's going on locally.

And I think it's _really hard_ for a contender like `stuff` to become a better alternative for many people without the 'social network' features of facebook. An easy way to see what events your friends are interested in, as a primary one.

IDK, I think there's room for improvement in this area. I've had an idea rolling around in my head for a couple of years but I've never pursued it:

I lived in NYC for a few years, and every so often I'd find myself wandering around the city on a weekend afternoon, wondering what I should do. Ideally, there'd be an app where I could simply open it up, look at a map, set it to the current time or maybe within an hour or so, and easily see events near me.

That app just does not exist. You can get kinda close with a few apps, but not really. In this context, I don't care what my friends are doing, I just want to find something cool period.

I think that's because NYC is one of the few places that an app just like you describe would make any sense. :)

In many places, the list of "things happening this hour on a weekend afternoon within 10-20 minutes of where I am right now that I might possibly be interested in" approaches zero.

On the other hand, if there is a huge list of events happening close to you soon at any given time, the problem is "that I might possibly be interested in." The "things my friends expressed interest in" is useful not just because my friends might be there (although that can be a plus, or a prompt to text one of em and say hey you wanna go to this), but because if a buncha my friends are interested in it, that makes it more likely it will be something that will appeal to me, because my friends in aggregate are more likely than random to be interested in things I am.

I'll give you another scenario. I was in Mississippi (virtually the opposite of NYC) with my sister and her 2 children. We wanted to find things to do in the area that was kid friendly but also relatively cheap.

This led me to spending something like 30-45 minutes trudging through various websites, the local paper, etc. I eventually found about 3-5 different options.

Simply broaden the definition of "things happening" and the number is definitely not zero.

On iOS there is an app called "Local" developed by Facebook. I only have Facebook for the events part and I only use it through this app.

It kind of sucks that they have a monopoly on events except maybe Resident Advisor which is sometimes better than Facebook for Techno and House parties. But they are missing the invite and seeing what other people are doing that aren't in to my niche music.

Yeah at this point creating any "general" FB events alternative is just foolish and will wither in time.

There are literally only three ways out:

1) Create an events alternative for a niche group. This is what RA is, but it could easily also be for a university (like Highkey is doing for college events) or for a certain local area.

2) One of the other media giants creates an events alternative. Google, Twitter, Snapchat. That could still somehow work out.

3) Find a way to piggyback off FB's users/events. Seems like this would need to be done in some way that is clearly against their TOS, but we have seen startups form in similar means anyway. I already see some spam by sites that scrape events and attendee lists from FB, but they all seem to be in it just for the short run.

> Facebook events is one of the only things keeping a lot of people I know on facebook.

I suspect that events will be one of the last things keeping people on Facebook generally, just like music and artist pages kept MySpace going for years after losing relevance otherwise.

I tried for a while to leverage Facebook, YouTube, Meetup to support two orgs. Pages, events, RSVPs, etc.

I'd like to see some case studies of success, because it was a lot of effort with very little show for it, and I'm fresh out of ideas (and goodwill).

> I think facebook API's don't really allow you to have that kind of integration for a third-party thing though. I would assume this is intentional.

It's definitely intentional, because older versions of the Facebook APIs had this functionality, but it was later removed...

> I find out about a lot of events on fb not by searching for events, but by facebook timeline telling me "your fb friend is interested/going to this event.

Funny enough, this is the main reason I don't use the Going/Interested buttons on Facebook anymore. I'm not a fan of having my activity broadcast to everyone on my friends list.

The alternatives of such integrated platform is chat app, which ironically, the most popular chat app is Whatsapp owned by Facebook. So if someone built a event management software based on Whatsapp's new API and start gaining traction, facebook would steal the idea and launch their own.

The smartest move Facebook ever made was gobbling up the options most likely to be alternatives to FB once people got sick of it.

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