The New Upcoming
Whew! The new release of Upcoming is finally out the door. We're still working out the bugs, so let us know if you find anything broken or weird! Lots to talk about, and I'm sure you'll have lots of questions, so let's get right into it. What's new?Upcoming Grows Up
The most noticeable change is our new name and domain. We're no longer a tiny non-profit side project, so we decided to drop the ".org" and move to an official Yahoo! domain. (We tried to buy Upcoming.com for years, but they refused.) In addition to making Yahoo! sign-ins and registration much simpler to implement, being on an official Yahoo! domain means more visibility and better integration with the rest of Yahoo! And don't worry about changing your bookmarks; links to Upcoming.org will continue to redirect correctly forever.
Switch to Yahoo IDs
Another big change is our switch to Yahoo! IDs. Following closely on the heels of Flickr and Bix, we've finally abandoned our legacy sign-in system for Yahoo's own login system. (Having problems? Try the Migrate Help.)
We've mentioned this for months, but this was a no-brainer. You wouldn't know it, but our legacy sign-in system is an endless source of headaches. About 1/3rd of our support requests come from people who didn't get their registration email, forgot their password, forgot their username, or can't login for some other reason. Since nearly everyone online already has a Yahoo! account, this opens up Upcoming to a huge new audience.
While freeing us up to do other cool stuff, it also makes deeper integrations with Flickr and the rest of Yahoo! much, much easier. Keep an eye out for some of these things soon.
New Homepage
We've made many, many design improvements across the site, but the biggest is the new homepage. We're surfacing the best events that the Upcoming community has discovered worldwide, now broken out by date and category. This new design is available to everyone, including signed-out users. This includes Flickr photos from recent events in your area, a snapshot of all the newly-watchlisted events nearby, and a long-requested date picker.
Bye, Metros! Hello, Places!
We've finally phased out our old metro system, and replaced it with the wonderfully comprehensive places database that powers Flickr's maps and other Yahoo! properties. Personally, this is the one I'm most excited about, just because it's been my biggest source of headaches for years. And judging from the metro complaints on the suggestions board, I'm not alone.
User-defined metros seemed like a good idea at the time, but it only got us so far. The problems with metros were plenty: people added non-existent or duplicate metros, fictional or junk metros, and typo place-names. The bigger issues were with containment -- events in the San Francisco metro didn't show up in San Francisco Bay Area. This was an endless source of confusion and headaches. One out of three support requests were actually metro-related problems.
Now, adding a new venue means simply giving us the address. We'll automatically put it in all appropriate places -- your local neighborhood, city, state, and country. Even nicknames like West Coast or West End will work fine.
Try searching for places around the world to see what it looks like, or start from our new Places page. This is very new and experimental, so please let us know if you find problems.
New My Events, Friends' Events, User Pages
We've devoted new pages to exploring your own events, your friends' events, and completely redesigned the user pages (
One more thing...
Oh, we have a little surprise for all you old-school Upcoming users. Just look for something special on the homepage when you sign in. Enjoy a little present from us (while supplies last). :)
Suggestions? Problems
If you have ideas for improvements, please use the Suggestion Board. We are reading this every day. To prove it, here are the list of suggestions that are fixed in this release. Add (and vote) for what we you want!
13 suggestions, fixed! Switch to Yahoo! IDs, calendar interface (and here), problems with inaccurate metros at sign-in, bug with searching for non-ASCII and an easy way to list all venues in a metro.
We also fixed many problems with incorrect or duplicate metros, including this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. Whew!
And if you have any other problems or bugs, just contact us directly. Thank you all!
Posted by 
waxpancake at April 19, 2007
waxpancake at April 19, 2007- Tools
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Great work on the redesign.
I worked a lot on the Places feature so I'd love to hear what you non-USA people think. You now have a mole inside Upcoming, so watch for more in the near future.
I was actually really hoping see alot of enhancements to the badges, like a calendar view (ala google calendar)
We're adding new badges very soon.
Oh, the only bad thing about using Yahoo IDs is that mine is one that I chose when I was an interweb n3wb back in '97 or '98, and it's so embarrassingly bad that I cringe when I have to tell it to people.
I'm off to add an event now...
congrats on the upgrade, and hope too many folks don't get PO'd at the username merge ;)
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
New Site = So Purdy
Micah: your secret is safe with us. I don't think there's any way a third party should be able to find out your Yahoo ID (besides, that's not that bad, I've seen way worse :)
Dave, Jess: we've gotten some reports of merging redirection wonkiness and will be trying to chase that down.
Paul and other UK'ers, no promises, but hmm...
The redesign looks good, I'm looking forward to integration with flickr and the rest of the yahoo sites
BTW, I too got the same error when merging accounts as others are mentioning.
and the badges are broken at present.
I like the new header, but I'm a bit biased (since I designed it). If anyone wants to take a shot at mocking up a better one, go for it and post a screenshot! (We're very open to constructive criticism... Remember when Jonathan Nolen reworking our event pages after we redesigned them?)
1. There are still broken parts (parts not migrated completely), like here:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=Users&scope=allmetros&q=splorp&Search=Search
which still links to upcoming.org in the result's anchor link.
2. because upcoming uses yahoo apis, and those are not located on the same server (yui.yahooapis.com), your site does not display correctly at work. :(
Still, unified logins seem to be helpful. I'm sure it was a rough transition. Keep up the mods and updates!
yep, right here: http://www.article19.co.uk/06/written_feature/broken_bones_healing_hands.php
all was well after the switch and now nothing is showing up, they've worked flawlessy for an age now.
ta! ;o)
NB: Safari's Activity viewer reports thus
"http://upcoming.yahoo.com/v1/?badge_type=group&badge_size=med&badge_layout=
v&badge_styling=0&badge_no_background=&badge_venue=
1&date_format_type=us_lrg&id=1862"
not found (i've added breaks in to stop it overflowing)
I also like the Flickr and Ma.gnolia integration and unified logins. In the past few months, i had almost given up on Upcoming, and started using Eventful to feed my other pages, but could not seem to get very many friends to use it. Maybe they'll have to adopt Open ID.
Now if only users would improve on the sloppiness of some submissions…
re: the header
Here is how we would do it but making stuff in Photoshop is a lot easier than coding it and making it work. ;o)
-Cody
I have a couple reservations with the new header in terms of menu alignment and that it could probably use a skosh (technical design term) more breathing room at the top, but overall, I like it - it's refreshing and playful.
Having seen a couple mockups now that people have done, I think I'm convinced that the new header could have done much worse. You can't please everyone, but that's what Greasemonkey is for. :)
But why only if i am American i can get it? I live in Europe (Italy) and so i can't get anything :-(
I've given everything more room to breathe though, lined up all the bits on the left and right margins that varied before & grouped the nav slightly more logically. 'My Account' appears with the other 'My' pages and the 'Add new event' link isn't off running free in the woods on its own.
Comments?
I like what Yahoo has done with flickr; I'm sure they'll be responsible with Upcoming also.
Now, if you only would consider sending t-shirts to Norway as well... :)
Perhaps, like badges, this basic feature has simply gone unlinked since the relaunch?
the iCal subscribe is under the RSS Subscribe icon on any group page. Perhaps a touch confusing because iCal is not an RSS reader. Perhaps this needs to be tweaked?
;o)
I assume that I'm misunderstanding, because that doesn't make much sense at all, except for really hard-core Flickr fans with a lot of frequent flier miles. :)
a company like upcoming is not so stupid to delete such things as there is absolutly no reason to do so. "quickly removed" is already a sign for something went wrong on the user side = something was entered in a way it made it disappear. There is no one watching over your events and saying "hei! quick! delete!".
When this continues, loosing a single password to an identity theft compromises ALL my accounts.
There's good reason to have different screen names & passwords. And what about privacy !! Now one more way Y! can track your every move. Like Google too.
I like the new shiny bits of the site though!
Hooray for longer urls.
greetings
Expect some new stuff on this front soon.
Any chance I can import friends from my email account to see if they're already on Upcoming?
Thank you guys so much and keep working......
I am seo analyst and regular visitors of upcoming. Recently i have started seo community and updating events, Functionality is very userfriendly.
Instead of create paid meetup.com Group, We have found better Friendly platform at upcoming.yahoo.com.
Thanks Upcoming Team.
I can not wait for 360 to start using Flickr.
I like that it shows venues I can't find other places
especially since I prefer these smaller and less mainstream venues. Looks good 2 me.
Add a spot of a logo for the event!