Upcoming.org, Zvents, Eventful: Making Events Findable
Filed in archive Event Software by pete on March 25, 2006
However, there still isn't a google of event search. Of course, I'd imagine google and yahoo both have something up there sleeves. But, as of now, there are only a handful of companies that are indexing and aggregating information about events from multiple sources and making them searchable through a web based interface and their APIs.
I've written quite extensively (1, 2, 3) about the challenges with making events searchable and findable. And while I had hoped that event schemas were discussed and agreed upon in the open, and public stores of event information were made available for any service to innovate on top of, there are companies that are making gradual progress towards aggregating event information. They are upcoming.org, eventful and zvents.
Upcoming.org was, of course, acquired by Yahoo last year. However, I'd pick upcoming.org as the site most likely to succeed at getting lots of eyeballs in front of event information. Upcoming.org currently lets anyone enter an event through the site or through their API. They are not actively aggregating events from other sites, but there are other sites that are using their API to enter data into Upcoming.org's growing database of events. Upcoming.org was absorbed into Yahoo's Local Search division and events are already integrated into Yahoo Local's search results.
View image
Although Upcoming.org was launched before EVDB's Eventful, Eventful has much more aggressively struck deals with other online event services to gather as many events into their system as possible. All of meetup's meetups are published to Eventful. And Mollyguard recently started adding their events to Eventful. Additionally, Eventful lets users publish their events to upcoming.org and Zvents through those service's respective APIs.

Zvents is a third company that, on the surface, is very similar to Upcoming.org and Eventful. Zvents specifically focusses on indexing and aggregating event information from multiple sources using more traditional Crawling
and indexing techniques. They also [plan to] work with media companies to provide event information and advertising solutions. Stay tuned for those announcements and for more cities. Did I miss any other companies working in this space?
Permalink: Upcoming.org, Zvents, Eventful: Making Events Findable
Tags:
zvents eventful
Trackback: http://www.creative-weblogging.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.pl/18883








