Why do event sites suck?
jtoy.net
jtoy.net
You're missing the bigger picture. Forget about tight calendar integration and blah blah, that's a nice to have, and reasonably easy compared to the bigger problems.
Event sites suck because they never have most of the events you want to go to. And without some fundamentally new way of learning about events, they never will.
Events sites are trying to do something a lot harder than the typical Web 2.0 startup. They are trying to build an accurate and complete picture of the real world, with a constantly shifting time horizon of about a few weeks, out of relatively apathetic users and very flaky and fragmented and non-technologized players (promoters, fans, etc.).
Contrast that with say, a photo hosting site. The assets at a photo hosting site are all-digital, last for years and constantly accrue new visitors. If you uploaded a photo to Flickr in 2005, it's still making money for them today, one way or another. It's also still garnering the user comments and page views, giving them some love at the same time. You have no expectation that Flickr should have all the photos you want to know about, just that there be enough good ones.
Your idea of autodiscovery via microformat already exists (hCalendar) but good luck getting others to use it. There are several startups which tried natural language parsing to grok events from the web but none came close to succeeding. The best method might be to reuse calendar entries, and Google's made some efforts in this direction.
Anyway, all the above problems seem to confine event startups to, at best, becoming authoritative for certain local scenes. None have ever taken off and just become authoritative even for an entire city, or a music category across cities. The only ones who are winning are just pouring money into the problem, sucking up event data from a variety of commercial sources. So far there's no real community solution to this problem.
I am not convinced that very many people care about discovering new events in the first place, at least not events that don't have an immediate impact on one's social status. People learn about most events from their friends or their existing communities. This should not seem strange because people become friends with one another (or join communities) through having aligned interests. This solution seems optimized already. I don't think you can beat it, or at least not in a way that creates enough value to justify a standalone "event community". Does it hit home that you, OP, may be essentially trying to create a community around people with the common interest of "We like to attend events"?
Ah, but you say: "Well, the key value will be that people will link to their friends and they will interact around the events that they will attend together. We're covered." Indeed, this is usually listed in the first set of bulleted features people start whiteboarding:
Idea #27: Let's Build an Event Site!
* Aggregate all events from everywhere... except recurring Sunday church services, random unknown people's birthday (who published their private event as public), and dozens of guys who are making up interesting-sounding events just trying to do lead generation for their Quixtar, TEAM, etc get-rich-using-something-similar-to-a-pyramid-scheme-but-we-swear-its-not-a-pyramid-scheme group.
* Let people pick what events they are interested in and add them to their 'list'.
* Let people invite their friends to use this service too and they can link up their profiles as "friends" in the system. (awesome, we're viral!)
At this point in the bullet-list, OP, someone needs to state the obvious (either you or your co-founder) and suddenly say, "Well, can't they just use email to invite friends to events?" ... then the both of you can avoid going down this path and focus on problems that people actually have and are willing to pay you to solve.
Ah, and I just have to mention that no one really cares that much about calendars either. It is exceptionally rare that people use them outside of work. And really, if you are employed at a major corp, you can't very likely import your schedule for your wild week at Sturgis into your work calendar. Some people frown on knowing the tacky aspects of your life outside of work.
Now that seems like a rather gross generalization... Meetup.com is a fairly large and somewhat successful site based on events drawing on strangers (There are 66,241 Meetup Groups around the world meeting about 22,993 interests). Maybe you just don't find these people high enough status?
Of course, this doesn't mean that the other problems of an event site are easy to solve. Meetup does generate quite an excess of emails but I put up with them since I find of the groups interesting.
My definition of an event is: A social gathering of my friends, or friends of friends. I don't care about random trivia nights, but I might check them out if my immediate friends are going to them.
I believe that an "event community" is a misguided notion. Going to the same event as a perfect stranger is not a strong enough context for socialization.
People who have just moved to a new place do a lot of that, soon they get a new peer group. Finding the right events is easier than it once was with online tools, but still not trivial.
I will disagree about the calendaring thing. Perhaps my friends are all overscheduled Bay Area people but we do use calendars outside of work. Furthermore, promoters and venue owners do have to use something like a calendar tool, eventually, and that is a potential gateway to grabbing good event data and republishing it. I don't know of anyone that's courting this side of the market well. Offering these people the carrot of better tools plus the even tastier carrot of automatic connections with fans, syndication, promotion, might work.
I've mostly moved on from the problem, but would be happy to talk to anyone who's interested, share my experience, etc.
I think the problem is structural - the money flows from gig promoters, hence the interface is not built for the user's desires.
Other commenters raise interesting points as to why this problem is harder than others - events have so many niches, there's a new set of them for each new set of users. And unlike on stackoverflow, in a month all of that data has lost almost all of its value and you need new data.
The idea was to improve the user experience - basically by putting a Pandora-like system in behind a Google-like front end. We launched it, it worked great. With a few clicks the site would sort everything in the city by what you'd be most interested in, and keep that sorting (without signing up) for the next time you came. But about a month in we concluded that the UI was not the issue. I agree with StrawberryFrog in that the issue is structual.
I think that there's still a big missing piece. Something's got to get event listers and event seekers in one place that adds more value than just finding things to do (and I don't think content like local news is anywhere near enough). I'm half expecting something to evolve out of Facebook events, but it's not there yet.
Also, crunching the revenue numbers from local (Vancouver) weeklies, then multiplying worldwide, it's not the kind of money that you can take a lot of investment for. People just don't spend much time looking for things to do.
Short answer: it's a feature, not a product. But to what product does this feature get added? I don't know yet... There's been a _lot_ of failed attempts already.
A full-featured event/calendar plugin app might be really cool...
But the "space" is very amorphous. It could include anything from getting twenty people with similar interests together on a Saturday night to rock concert and lecture promotion.
1. Location-aware mobile searching. I can't recall how many times I've been driving around with my wife on a Friday night wondering "what should we do tonight?" ... if you built a startup around this post/concept, I think it would be a big mistake not to put a lot of resources into an iPhone/smartphone app. Think of it like Yelp's iPhone app but for events.
2. Let event coordinators sell tickets to paid events from your site. Don't do ecommerce and take a transaction fee. Just let them plug-in PayPal/Google CO info and be done with it. You'll immediately have an advantage over sites that don't do this.
Heads up for: - Craigslist. If you start scraping their sites, they will probably block you at some point. - Facebook. FB is growing rapidly as a place for events/RSVPs and it fits well within the "social graph" ... the latest FB iPhone app puts events front and center. Expect them to be a big competitor in this space.
Other low-hanging fruit: - City/chamber websites. Every city or chamber of commerce website has an event calendar. You'll probably want to scrape those. - Community colleges, libraries, etc. have non-credit/weekend classes and workshops. If you had a way for them to sell tickets, it might be a nice draw.
That's all I got for now ...
What eventful don't have is a good search or good marketing. But neither of those are insurmountable problems, and I'm sure they'll tackle them in time. Or just get bought by google who can deal with both of them.
However one problem is that many events are not listed on any event directory, but just on individual websites, those are much harder to spider and deal with.
"I think a spider should be employed that searches
the web for events and adds them into the database."
If you can do this you can make money, but I don't think it's so trivial...
Organizing time-based items is much less trivial than people imagine...
And there is less immediate bang for succeeding than other search spaces. And determining if, say, recurring event is still recurring two months after it is first posted is tricky.
It's has elements of Twitter, but is built specifically for casual social events. Sponty gives users a way to broadcast their social intentions, like "Lunch in Harvard Square", where all their friends are implicitly invited.
In addition, Sponty tries to answer two questions: 1. What are my friends doing today? obviously this doesn't work right away ... you need to have some friends on it first.
2. What are other's doing in Boston/network today? We show you all the public events people have posted in a given network: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston
We're trying to crowd source the answer to this question, because crawling is too hard and too inaccurate. Also, most of the really interesting stuff cannot be crawled.
One more: We categorize events by icons. For example, here are beer related events in Boston today: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/beer
or music: http://www.thesponty.com/whatsup/#/today/Boston/music
For example I trust Orbitz/Kayak to find nearly any flight I might care about (as long as it is not in SE asia), but there is no such site where I could search for events and not feel like I might be missing out on something.
I was thinking of this could be built, but figured I must be in some sort of minority. I assume not many people are willing to travel long distances just to attend tech events, and if they are local events, maybe you know about them already.
I can't be bothered to sift through the damn noise on upcoming, etc.
This filter might be a search engine but I actually have other ideas on this front...
(I no longer work there, but their product looks better than ever.)
So if they can't get it right, for a limited scope of live music events, it is clearly as tough to get right as others say it is.
Also, when I run my own event--via evite or whatever--for god's sake, I want to be able to mass-SMS my attendee list with a single click. It's impossible to broadcast last minute changes except via text message or phone call.
Upcoming sux as well, not to mention it constantly defaults to the wrong location even tho my yahoo profile spells it out.
Another thing: too much about "bands playing" which drowns out all event lists, put bands in a folder, offer other categories ...
It's mostly focused on Portland tech events at this time, and I don't know how well it would scale up, it's also not a business, it's provided as a service to the community which means it's not operating under the same constraints you would face as a startup.
Could a microformat handle the job of tagging an event and let google do the walking? Maybe you could build a startup to organize a portal after that, but can you really crawl better than the big crawlers?
You expect me to provide any sort of email - with no statement of company mission, target audience, benefits claimed?
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect any email addresses.
* The date and time of the event
* The event location
* Price
* Any other relevant information (dress-code, what to bring, etc) or at least a prominent link to said information
I recently started building http://minivite.com to address that problem.
Uh, that doesn't qualify as "sucking"!