One way upcoming is cool is the flexibility you have when you go to schedule an event. Remember that you, yes you, can schedule events! You can make an event public or private. When you make it public, anyone in the world can see the event announcement. Good for drumming up new friends. Bad for letting any sort of detractors know what you're up to. When you make it private, the only people who can see it without a personal invitation are the people you have on your upcoming friend list.

So there then, is at least one way you could decide who to put on your upcoming friend list. If you plan on scheduling events yourself, don't put random strangers on there, don't put enemies on there. Distressed about the mathematical possibility that you have two friends who can't be in the same room together and you want to plan events and... Simple. Don't use upcoming's friend list feature. You can hand pick who you want to invite to each event you schedule, and for keeping lists of your online friends, do that on another site! Heaven knows there are enough choices out there.

Ok, so back to inviting people. Yes, you can send personal invitations for both public and private events. You can also send an invitation to the group as a whole. This is general way of announcing a T Party event. You schedule the event and invite the group as a whole.

You can also invite people and groups to events that others have scheduled. Lets say you see an announcement on upcoming.com of a cool band playing somewhere or other and you think it would make a fun group outing? It just takes a couple of mouse clicks to announce your idea to the group.

The way upcoming.com notifies you of events is probably a bit different than what you're used to. You're probably used to email notifications and being able to set notification preference in your group settings somewhere. Upcomming.com uses a thing called RSS. I won't explain it all here, but here, I think, is the easiest way to turn on notifications and get started:

1. Go to your profile page. Look in the top right corner of the upcoming.com banner where it says "Welcome, (your name or ID)." Click on your name to get to your profile page.

2. See on the left there where it says "All My Stuff in RSS"? Click on that. That's the easy, I don't want to figure it all out now, choice. :)