Incoming!

Searching, Invite by E-mail, and More

Some more big changes this week... The short version: you can now invite friends to events by e-mail, search for stuff, subscribe to feeds for tags and venues, and hide personal events from strangers. Also, I'll talk about some small changes to the API and a look at how people are using Upcoming.org. More details about everything inside.

1. Search

You can now search for events, venues, and users! When logged in, you can switch between searching your metros and all metros... And when you search from a specific metro page, you can also restrict results to only that metro.

2. Invite by E-mail

On every event page, you'll see a new option in the right-hand toolbar: "Invite by E-mail." This lets you enter in e-mail addresses of your friends, which will send them a message telling them about the event.

If they're not already a user, they'll optionally be prompted to register. When they do, they'll have the choice of automatically joining the metro, adding the event to their watchlist, and adding you as a friend. Simple!

This works great on personal events, so please try it and share your experiences.

3. RSS Feeds for Tags and Venues

Venues and tags have RSS feeds now, so you syndication junkies can keep track of even more stuff.

4. Friends-Only Events

Events and venues marked personal/private will now only be seen by you and people you've marked as your friends. This extends throughout the site, in event lists, searches, RSS feeds, and so on.

In addition to these changes, the Developer's API has been revamped a bit with better documentation and complete support for private events.

How are people using it? The first use of the API was Alf Eaton's Flitter, which ties together every open API in the book to show you information from around the web on musicians and authors. The second, almost ready for release, is the Upcoming::API Perl library by Greg Knauss. He'll be submitting it to CPAN, and developing a MovableType plugin next.

Outside of the API, people are doing some neat stuff with the RSS feeds. Brian del Vecchio wrote a great Drupal module for Upcoming.org. And popular Washington DC-based blog DCist is now using Upcoming.org to manage their community calendar.

We'll get a wiki up soon for announcing and keeping track of all these uses, but until then, let us know what you're working on!