Incoming!

Huge Changes!

As promised, some huge changes to Upcoming.org! The short list: support for personal and self-promotional events, tagging of events, a complete API, improved visual design, and e-mail/SMS reminders. More details inside...

1. Personal and self-promotional events. In the past, personal events (like weddings, birthdays, and parties) weren't allowed because they would display on every public event page. Self-promotional events, however, were forbidden because I originally thought they might limit the relevance of results for most users. Both of these restrictions are now gone! When adding or editing your events, two checkboxes allow you to mark events as personal and/or self-promotional. Please use these boxes!

(Note that I'm planning to eventually limit public self-promotional events to a certain quota, with the option to purchase more listing with Paypal for a nominal fee. Listing private self-promotional events will always be free, so venues and promoters can always use Upcoming.org to manage their own calendars.)

2. Tagging. The use of simple tags to describe content, made popular in such excellent applications as Del.icio.us and Flickr, makes its way to Upcoming.org... On every event page, everyone is encouraged to add tags to describe events. The Popular Tags page shows the top 100 most popular tags. Note than anyone can add tags to any public event, but you can only remove the tags you yourself have added.

3. Developer's API. For all you geeks out there, we've added a complete RESTful API for retrieving, adding, and searching for events, venues, watchlists, and metros. We're excited to see how people use this, so please e-mail us or post your applications in the comments! A huge, huge thanks to the amazing Gordon Luk for writing all of this. (If you find any problems with the API, please let us know.)

4. New design. Event pages, like this one, were redesigned with a focus on readability. There have been other small subtle changes throughout the site that we hope you like.

5. E-mail/SMS Reminders. Thanks to effort of Leonard Lin, you can now sign up for event reminders by e-mail or to nearly any cellphone that supports SMS. Yay!

So, what's next? Searching for users, metros, venues, and events is the biggest priority. Also: Better social networking support, including inviting friends to join and become your friends. Event sharing by e-mail. Easy one-click syndication of events to your own website. RSS/iCal feeds for venues and your past events, and event histories for venues. User and developer's forums.

Again, post your ideas or feature requests to let us know what you want the most.