The thing about useful stuff is

Zipiko - meeting friends made easy Monday, November 10, 2008

Zipiko is a new approach to arranging meet-ups with friends that I can imagine catching on, which is showcasing at Le Web.

In concept it is very similar to Upcoming.org or even Meetup in that it is orientated around the notion of publishing events which your friends can see. The service is free [no ads spotted either] and is entirely web-hosted.

Members set up an event, detailing time and place plus comments. Thereafter friends can either be specifically invited or the event made public amongst your friends who can choose to participate in the open invite. Hence you can see events that your friends are organising and elect to opt in e.g. join your friends to watch the rugby in the pub.

I found that setting up an event was very easy and intutitive, via the simple online interface. Likewise, inviting friends was very easy. Interestingly the service currently send free SMS messages or emails to invite people, as well as notifying you of their responses.

To add friends to your account, you have the option of importing your phone contacts as well as importing contact from Gmail. Any friends you do add have to positively accept your invite to connect. I confess that didn't find either appealing since my address books co-mingle friends and business contacts. I think they should definitely be looking to add the capability to import contacts from services like Facebook, Twitter etc and you can buy code to do this off the shelf these days for less than $100.

The site claims it has been configured to be easy to use via mobile phone and a brief check on my own Blackberry phone browser did confirm this.

Connecting your events to your calendar is possible albeit only 30 Boxes appeared to be supported when I tried.

Whilst I understand that the team behind this are keen that you regularly use their site, I think the service would benefit from creating an ical feed of events from your "crowd" that could be accessible by calendar applications, with entries that link back to the Zipiko site. I say this because Gmail and Google calendar are two webapps I use constantly whereas I am initially less likely to have Zipiko open constantly. Likewise, it would be great if you could "send an calendar invite" to your own Zipiko account from say Google calendar to be added to the events list.

Worth trying when organising your next social meetup.

Labels: gmail, Google Calendar, meeting, meetup, social networks

posted by John Wilson @ 8:43 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit

BusyTonight? Friday, February 09, 2007

I've mentioned that I use upcoming.org as well as meetup.com to keep an eye on what various chums are planning on getting up to in future as a prompt/tipoff so that I too can wander along to interesting/fun events. Of course, the trouble with this is having to rely upon them to be socially conscious/responsible enough to post their future plans for "my benefit".

BusyTonight is a service that is trying to overcome this problem as well as trying to deal with the fact that the market for event listings is hopelessly fragmented

Presently only operating in the US, it is a search engine for events. It is algorithmically driven via a Web crawl. The index of event listings is generated "automatically" - the software aims to identify pages with events and extract the event listings accurately.

Hence it seeks to eliminate the need for good natured folks to post their plans to a service and the same service! As such Busytonight is not dependent on having a critical mass of motivated users to type in event data - the content only needs to published on the Web.

They claim to be closing in on one million unique, future events with plans to expand to the rest of the English speaking world in Q1 of next year, and begin including non-English content in Q2.

They intend to generate revenues from a combination of pay-per click advertising and commissions on ticket sales. There's also the potential to sell the harvested data to a variety of other sites that offer tangential businesses.

Only founded in April 2005, there are only five people working full-time on BusyTonight including Joshua C Lerner (CEO), Richard Mintz (COO) and Matt Kangas (CTO).

Clearly there are a number of challenges here

These are not recommendations from friends that you trust or can meet up with at the events. So the quality of the events is uncertain.
Depending on how successfully the crawler works, you could easily end up with misclassifications of place, date or content that means you miss things or waste time looking at irrelevant stuff on listings it suggests.
The sheer volume of stuff it finds will take some wading through. Upcoming lists for London are big enough. Whilst I could filter/search for specific events or topics, that overlooks the serendipitous events you stumble across which look interesting
Timeliness of the crawling. If events can be posted on any site and at any time, will the spiders pass by sufficiently frequently to spot last minute entries on sites? Whilst other automated crawlers have the same issue, a human posting to a service overcomes this (of course, this can be one of the sites busytonight crawls over).
Accuracy of tags could be frustrating. I tried to search for "comedy" in San francisco as a test. The results were odd as you can see from the image below, which included CityFlight - Black and African American History …

I very much like the concept though, representing a very useful vertical search - most of us go out and not just to eat/drink.

For future enhancements it would be great if they could add to it

services like google's alert provides to notify me via email/rss that something matching my criteria has appeared.
the ability for people to "ping" the service to notify it of events announcements, rather than await the crawlers
the ability to "tag" their site as an event site in order that the crawlers visit more often

The unfortunately named Minger blog also covered busytonight here (UK readers will know what I'm referring to and if you don't try this site for a clue, which my friend Matt pointed me in the direction of this evening for some evil reason).

Labels: busytonight, event, meetup, Upcoming

posted by John Wilson @ 11:38 PM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit