The New York Times :: Online Diary: A Collaborative Event Calendar
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL
...Event listings in newspapers and city magazines can be frighteningly comprehensive (there's far too much going on). But there's one thing they cannot tell you about a concert or lecture: who is planning to go.
A new site, Upcoming.org, calls itself a collaborative event calendar because its listings are created by users rather than by newspapers or venues. Once you register - a brief, free process - you can enter the events you plan to attend. The site then sorts the events by metropolitan area and shows which users have expressed an interest in them.
One appealing aspect is the ability to track the events listed on your friends' calendars. "Now I can see what concerts my friends are going to and who else is going to the concerts I'm going to," said Andy Baio, a Web programmer in Santa Monica, Calif., who created the site in his free time.
Because Upcoming.org lets users post their photos and create "friends" lists, it has been compared to sites like Friendster. But Mr. Baio sees a crucial difference. "Friendster shows who's connected to who, but it doesn't let you do anything with that information," he said.
Like most social networking applications, Upcoming.org becomes more useful as more people join. The site grew to 2,000 users its first month by word of mouth and now lists more than 1,500 events in 42 states and 44 countries.
Eventually Mr. Baio may have to recruit "super users" to help enforce rules against self-promotion (venues can't enter their own listings, for example) and to weed out fake listings. A recommendation engine will be added, he said, "to suggest events to you that otherwise you may never have heard about."...
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