A mostly frustrating day for me struggling with CSS and PHP for the site for our summer conference day at work (to be revealed). I guess I learned a lot about both of those things in the struggle, though, so it will undoubtedly pay off eventually.
In the meantime, I want to sing the praises of Upcoming. It’s been around for awhile – but doesn’t seem to have had a lot of attention in the blog circles I frequent. Everyone seems to use it, but no-one mentions it.
It is a fantastic product for internet geeks, like me and you, I guess. You could probably drink free beer in London every night if you use it to the full, but the main point is, for me:
- You meet some guy/gal at an event and they seem OK or Switched-On or whatever your criteria is.
- You can find their profile on the system and befriend them, assuming they’re game.
- You then find out about everything they’re going to. If you’ve got stuff in common to begin with, then those events are quite possibly the ones you want to go to.
That sounded a lot like it’s some sort of e-stalking mechanism, but it isn’t in practice. Even better, it appears to be spam-free and it can add in the events to your desktop or online calendar at the touch of a button.
Upcoming’s mission is, of course, to become the best social network for events, and it already is in my book, but if it added a personal calendar and contacts element which also allowed shared events (and maybe xfn or OpenID), then wouldn’t that be a GoogleCal and Outlook killer? It’s a Yahoo! property and so there’s a good chance that could actually happen.
(befriend me on Upcoming here)
Hey, thanks for the kind words. Much appreciated.