In his post Betty Dylan, Railroad Tavern, Sunday 8PM Jon Udell writes
I wondered why online services like upcoming.org hadn't yet gone viral, and I made a few suggestions, which were well received. But to be honest, the Keene, NH metro in Upcoming is no more lively now -- a day after Yahoo acquired Upcoming -- than it was six months ago. Case in point: the Betty Dylan band is coming to Keene on Sunday and Monday. I know this because a friend organized the event. But neither of the venues' websites -- Railroad Tavern and Keene State College -- has the information. Nor does the Keene Sentinel. What's more, none of these three websites makes calendar information available as RSS feeds. Yahoo's acquisition of Upcoming will certainly help move things along. As will the growing visibility of other such services, notably EVDBEventful. But since I expect no single one of these to dominate, or to supplant the existing calendars maintained by newspapers, colleges, and other venues, we have to think in terms of syndication and federation. RSS is a big part of the story. Calendar publishers need to learn that information made available in RSS format will flow to all the event sites as well as to individual subscribers.
I wondered why online services like upcoming.org hadn't yet gone viral, and I made a few suggestions, which were well received. But to be honest, the Keene, NH metro in Upcoming is no more lively now -- a day after Yahoo acquired Upcoming -- than it was six months ago.
Case in point: the Betty Dylan band is coming to Keene on Sunday and Monday. I know this because a friend organized the event. But neither of the venues' websites -- Railroad Tavern and Keene State College -- has the information. Nor does the Keene Sentinel. What's more, none of these three websites makes calendar information available as RSS feeds.
Yahoo's acquisition of Upcoming will certainly help move things along. As will the growing visibility of other such services, notably EVDBEventful. But since I expect no single one of these to dominate, or to supplant the existing calendars maintained by newspapers, colleges, and other venues, we have to think in terms of syndication and federation.
RSS is a big part of the story. Calendar publishers need to learn that information made available in RSS format will flow to all the event sites as well as to individual subscribers.
I think, like me, Jon Udell is grabbing a hold on things from the wrong end of the stick. When I first started working on the platform behind MSN Spaces, one of my pet scenarios was making it easier to create blog posts about events then syndicating them easily. One of the things I slowly realized is that unlike blogging which has killer apps for consuming syndicated content (RSS readers) there really isn't anything similiar for calendar events nor is there likely to be anything compelling in that space in the near future. The average home user doesn't utilize calendaring software nor is there incentive to start using such software. Even if every eventing website creates RSS feeds of events, the fact is that my girlfriend, my mom and even me don't maintain calendars which would benefit from being able to consume this data.
The corporate user is easier since calendaring software is part of communications clients like Outlook and Lotus Notes. However those aren't really the targets of sites like Upcoming or Eventful, however I suspect those are their best bets for potential users in the near term.