* Upcoming service categorizes events by location
I’ve always been surprised at how little attention has been paid to the cataloging and promotion of events online. Even when Web sites and services offer calendars very often they don’t take the next obvious step: Integrating with desktop calendars such as Outlook and iCal.
An interesting service that combines all of these features is upcoming.org now owned by Yahoo.
Upcoming is a user-driven service that categorizes events by location, date, and user specified tags. After registering (the service is free) you can select which geographical areas are of interest to you. Actually there are two main ways to do this and the less obvious, going straight to the area in the breadcrumb trail just underneath the title bar, is the fastest.
You’ll notice is that each event in your selected area will have a number of people listed – this is the total of people attending and “watching.” The former is simply the number of Upcoming users who have said they are going, the actual turnout could be in the hundreds or thousands.
When you examine the event detail the attending/watching totals are broken out and the handles of each user in both categories are listed. You can also send an event to your calendar, invite friends to events, and enable or disable reminders which can be sent via SMS or e-mail.
The options for exporting to your calendar are for iCal calendars, Outlook’s calendar, your Yahoo calendar, your Google calendar, or your 30 Boxes calendar. I found that under Microsoft Internet Explorer the export feature works fine. But under Firefox the iCal and Outlook options invoked the Mozilla calendar, which in both cases didn’t understand the data format.
You can share lists of events with friends and join groups as well as see which are the most popular groups.
Upcoming also provides a developers API based on RESTful, which uses HTTP POSTs and GETs and returns XML documents to find, create, edit and delete events.
The challenge for Upcoming is to get as many events included as possible and make the service the one that everyone refers to for event details. I suspect that this is a side project for Yahoo that isn’t getting the marketing effort it needs to succeed in the short term. That said, the service is a good part of the way there and if Yahoo “mashes” it up with other services, Upcoming could reach the critical mass required to become the de facto event calendaring service.
