{"id":338,"date":"2006-08-29T09:33:16","date_gmt":"2006-08-29T16:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/wp\/?p=338"},"modified":"2006-08-29T09:33:16","modified_gmt":"2006-08-29T16:33:16","slug":"upcomingorg-now-more-useful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2006\/08\/29\/upcomingorg-now-more-useful\/","title":{"rendered":"Upcoming.org Now More Useful"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sure, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/archives\/2006\/08\/on_vacation.html\">I said I was on vacation<\/a>, and I am. I&#8217;m just having some coffee, enjoying some open-ended web browsing, and &#8220;farting around.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div>\n<h2>Upcoming Updates<\/h2>\n<div>\n<p>Along those lines, <a href=\"http:\/\/upcoming.org\/news\/archives\/2006\/08\/28\/undiscov\/\">the recent updates<\/a> to Yahoo!&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.upcoming.org\">Upcoming.org<\/a> are nice and make it much more useful for people in cities other than New York and San Francisco. The problem I always had with Upcoming were the classic two problems with most locale-oriented services: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There weren&#8217;t enough events\/content for my locale, Austin.<\/li>\n<li>Very few or none of my friends use it. (<a href=\"http:\/\/upcoming.org\/user\/12648\/\">Here&#8217;s my page if you&#8217;d like to link up<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/archives\/2006\/04\/plazes_dodgebal.html\">dodgeball<\/a> over-came those those problems quite quickly.<\/p>\n<h2>More Events, Much More Events<\/h2>\n<p>But, back to upcoming. What they&#8217;ve done is sucked in events from <a href=\"http:\/\/local.yahoo.com\/\">Yahoo! Local<\/a> meaning that there&#8217;s now over 2,500+ events listed in Austin. Before, there were just 85 or so. Most of the new events are the kinds of hard to find things that I wanted Upcoming to help me find in the first place: happy hours, shows, and all the little things that you only find about in news papers and community listings.<\/p>\n<p>Upcoming also did some interesting integration with fellow Yahoo! Cool Kids Company, flickr. First, you can tell Upcoming your flickr username and it will use your flickr buddy-icon. That seems like a small thing, but usually you have to go ferret out a URL or (worse and more common) upload a photo. Here, I just type in &#8220;cote&#8221; and it works. On the back-end, this is a wise decision because flickr has already burned the CPU time re-sizing any images people upload: that is, Upcoming is farming out buddy-icon processing time to flickr&#8230;if you use that feature.<\/p>\n<h2>Photos from flickr<\/h2>\n<p>The other Upcoming-<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\">flickr<\/a> integration allows you to associate pictures from your flickr account to events in Upcoming. For example, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/upcoming.org\/event\/88822\/\">the pictures I &#8220;added&#8221; to the BarCampTexas event<\/a>. Upcoming creates a tag for the event, and then you simply add that tag to photos you want to associate with the event. Also of interest is that flickr adds a back-link to the Upcoming event, see the upcoming icon in the screenshot below:<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/228238204\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/86\/228238204_39c67c6665.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"376\" alt=\"Event in Upcoming.com\/flickr.com\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You can also see the upcoming tag: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/tags\/upcomingevent88822\/\">upcoming:event=88822<\/a>, which gets canonicalized to upcomingevent88822<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>Yahoo! Integration<\/h2>\n<p>Clearly, Yahoo! is working on more integration in their portfolio. Along those lines, it&#8217;s also interesting to note that Upcoming and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.flickr.com\/flickrblog\/2006\/08\/great_shot_wher.html\">flickr released revs<\/a> on the same day.<\/p>\n<p>The how&#8217;s of this Yahoo! integration should be interesting to anyone faced with integrating software and services together. The method of using tags coded with event IDs is a good example of non-realtime, time-shifted, and probably RSS-backed integration. One key characteristic to keep track of is how much the integration relies on crowd-sourcing and end users: I had to manually go add the tag.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, with <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.flickr.com\/flickrblog\/2006\/08\/great_shot_wher.html\">flickr&#8217;s new geotagging<\/a> (also dependent on user initiating the workflow), flickr theoretically knows the location of photos and the date the photo was taken, meaning Upcoming and flickr could make a best guess at assigning photos to events. But, that&#8217;s a whole lot of coding and processing. Out-sourcing that processing to end-users with tags is a lot easier. It&#8217;s good enough.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/archives\/2006\/08\/upcomingorg_now.html\"><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- technorati tags start --><\/p>\n<p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/calendaring\" rel=\"tag\">calendaring<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/flickr\" rel=\"tag\">flickr<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/integration\" rel=\"tag\">integration<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/upcoming\" rel=\"tag\">upcoming<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/yahoo\" rel=\"tag\">yahoo<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sure, I said I was on vacation, and I am. I&#8217;m just having some coffee, enjoying some open-ended web browsing, and &#8220;farting around.&#8221; Upcoming Updates Along those lines, the recent updates to Yahoo!&#8217;s Upcoming.org are nice and make it much more useful for people in cities other than New York and San Francisco. The problem [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaborative","category-programming"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}