Undiscovered Events, Flickr Integration, and More
Yeah, we've been busy. What's new? Undiscovered events, Flickr photos for events, buddy icons, new event pages, and more than we can remember.Undiscovered Events
Since we launched almost three years ago, you crazy kids have added over 100,000 events to Upcoming, making it the biggest and best social events community online. But creating events takes dedication and time, and we've wanted to make it easier ever since we came to Yahoo.
Today, we're very happy to announce a new section called Undiscovered Events. Unlike all the active events on Upcoming, this is a very deep well of events that Upcoming members haven't added yet, collected from around the web and updated daily by our friends over at Yahoo! Local. To put this in perspective, we increased the number of upcoming events by 3000% overnight. That's a little crazy.
This should help kick-start metros that haven't gotten off the ground, while making it easier to quickly find and add a wider range of events to Upcoming. It also gets around some of the dirty work of adding common events... Find and attend an undiscovered event and it's promoted to Active Events, where it can be discussed and shared forever.
And because we're way more comprehensive, this is well suited for tracking nationwide tours too. For example, tour dates for Def Leppard and Journey. Needless to say, this wasn't a concert tour that was very well represented on Upcoming before. Rock!
A huge thanks to everyone on the Yahoo! Local team that helped push these changes, but especially Ronnie, Peng, Don, Ganesh, Jian, and Van.
Event Filters
More events means we need better ways to browse them, so we've redesigned the metro listings and search results again, this time with event filters. On any list of events, you can now filter by metros, by category, or by date.
These filters carry over to the Export options, so you can easily set up an RSS feed or iCal calendar of all the music events happening near you this weekend, for example.
Flickr Photos for Events
Flickr and Upcoming taste great together! After many requests, we finally have photos for events! Tag your Flickr photos with the special Upcoming tag on every event page, and they'll automatically show up on Upcoming (example). (We have some neat ideas how to use these photos, once it gets more popular. Stay tuned.)
Also, Flickr will automatically add a link back to the Upcoming event from each of your tagged Flickr photos. Big thanks to Kellan and George on the Flickr team for pulling it off.
Buddy Icons
We now have avatars popping up throughout the site and if you're a Flickr user, setting your Upcoming buddy icon takes about five seconds. Just use the Change Buddy Icon page, put in your Flickr email address
New Event Pages
The old event pages were getting pretty stale, so we decided to take this opportunity to do a redesign (for example). A cleaner design with inline maps, other events at the same venue, live editing of tags/groups, buddy icons, Flickr photos, and a better toolbar.
New User Experience
For people coming to Upcoming for the first time, the homepage is ridiculously better. We take a best guess at your closest metro near you and show the most popular events in your area, with easy options to change your location. If they sign up, these locations carry over and they're automagically added to the metros. If you're signed in, try signing out and giving it a try.
100,000 Events!
Like I mentioned, one week ago, squarewithin added the 100,000th event to Upcoming, a Vancouver DJ show called Body Rock. A huge thank you to squarewithin, and every one of you that's made Upcoming so much more than a big list of events. Any bets on how long it takes to hit event #200,000?
What do you think?
We'd love to hear what you think... We've spent a lot of time on this, so are very interested in what you love and hate. Also, if you find bugs, please leave a comment so we can take care of it.
Posted by 
waxpancake at August 28, 2006
waxpancake at August 28, 2006
http://upcoming.org/event/96904/
love the new single event page (and buddy icons!!)
I'll give it time though, but I find the information is a bit too hard to scan -- i.e. who's coming and so forth.
Maybe you need to add some more line-height or something.
And hurry up with Upcoming-Flickr AUTH (or OpenID). That'd be nice.
It sticks with you, so that you can just pick the view you prefer for browsing that kind of view on the site. Give it a shot and see if that helps the scan-ability of the new views.
Hey, aren't you supposed to be at Burning Man? :)
Though, I'm now even more scared by the ease of which one can now discover drunken photos of Web 2.0 evangelists :)
Is there an automagic way to do this? Maybe a little link with a pop up or it publishes on the page, saying, "Taking photos of the event? Tag them with upcoming:blah:blah"? Or am I missing something and just overlooked it?
jnolen: Now THAT'S some seriously constructive feedback. Your mockup is a clear improvement in several key areas, and I'll make some changes first thing tomorrow based on it.
http://randomfoo.net/junk/200608/new.gif
* Totally agree about header color
* I did a rearrangement of what makes sense to me. Although the related events/events at the same venue has gotten lost. Still thinking on that...
I think that you've seen what's driving things like the somewhat questionable attendance list is that we don't want to unevenly eat into the event description area, since it'd wreak havoc w/ descriptions w/ photos, etc.
One bug, though: Canadian locations don't seem to be getting the maps. (E.g., http://upcoming.org/event/98850 )
Grant: we'll take a look. It's probably a geocoding issue.
for my personal purpose the title of the events is a little short. sorry - found absolutely nothing else to complain about... close to perfect!!!
energylab: Hooray! We've been pushing tons of tweaks of things that we didn't get to our yesterday. This release had a lot of dependencies/coordination, but we should be back to more frequent incremental stuff and will post a summary of updates soon.
msittig: we're looking into tweaking this to your Flickr email address I think, since there's been some confusion on what people's unique id's are...
Also, I think this flickr integration will get me using my flickr account again. I'm currently a paid subscriber - but use Opera Community. They send me free stuff for using their website. :D
Edit: Mmm, Munkyfest has been flickrized.
And flickr has been upcoming'ed:
The one thing I'd change though is to make the who's attending/watching full lists again. I liked being able to see at a glance how many people were coming/any names I knew. I chatted with some people on freenode about it, and there seemed to be some agreement. Perhaps make it a customisable setting (full or short listing)?
Not sure about the Undiscovered thing tho - in my Metro (Bristol UK) all the Undiscovered events are in Bristol USA.
The question here is surely 'how can you take photos at an event that's not yet happened?'
Maybe you're looking for a space to upload a flyer?
pleman: Unfortunately, Yahoo! Local doesn't have non-NA coverage (yet), so you might have to wait a bit for us to get some Undiscovered love for the UK.
o Event merge - many Undiscovered events are duplicated (your sample link currently has the following undiscovered events 60344009 and 60520115, which are the same event - oops). Also, many Undiscovered events already have been discovered (60578209 is 97913).
o Better location search - a number of Undiscovered events for arts events - I may not care about one particular show but it would be slick if I could click the location for an event I don't care about and see what else is coming up there.
But I was also wondering - where do you get the data for Undiscovered? Are there any plans to harvest microformatted events from somewhere like http://pingerati.net/ ?
(the question still stands tho...)
Edit: I've just discovered that there doesn't seem to be any way at all to see the venue phone number (unless I'm missing something here), come on guys, wake up at the back.
ta muchly
;o)
nb: Safari 2 on Tiger 10.4.7
If you accidentally send an event to the wrong group (it's a dropdown with no double-check) there doesn't seem to be a way to take it away from that group again (like you can with tags).
As far as better location search - we hear you and we have plans for better geo-exploration!
pieman: we can't say on what our plans are, but obviously it would make sense. ;)
Article19: Most of our venue data started out as being user entered and haven't been matched/augment, this is an additional data project that we've been working on.
fberriman: good call, adding it to our task list.
I've noticed a little bug. At least, I assume this is.
For example - on an event of mine (http://upcoming.org/event/100107/) It states 8 attending, but only 7 people (including myself) are listed in the attending list beside. Now, is it conincidence that those 7 people happen to be on my friends list, and the 8th isn't? There's no option to show the 8th person although they exist and are actually marked and attending.
Infact; http://fberriman.com/ueight.jpg
I'd used the Yahoo map service with raving success. This is another great tool. No reason to build your own application. Just hook into the strong foundation you've created.
Saved me about 2 days of work, and it will be a big hit with the residents of Carver County (a bedroom community of Minneapolis).
The following event is listed as having 3 comments on my upcoming events list, yet only actually has 2. I edited my own comment after posting so I assume that's when things went wrong.
http://upcoming.org/event/64541/
msittig: we've been talking about that sort of stuff recently but it's a little lower on our priority list. BTW, I also caught your blog post a couple weeks back - we'll be addressing some of the url issues in the future (although not some others).
Upcoming:event=143602
Upcoming:venue=45629
Event:Section=143
Event:Row=18
Event:Seat=17
This could give users a perspective on just what a particular section looks like.