David Emery Online

General Upcoming

28 November 2006

You may, or may not, have heard of a site called Upcoming.org. They’ve been around for a bit, so naturally they’re owned by Yahoo! but it’s a nice little site.

It’s yet another “Social Network”, “User Generated Content” based site (it ticks all the buzzword boxes), which enables you to add events to the site, which people ca then say they’re coming to. Add to this a dash of MySpace in the form of “Friends” you can quickly and easily get a picture of all the many events your friends are going to. Obviously you can also add comments to each event as well, allowing a nice bit of discussion around the event to take place – check out the page for the BBC Backstage London Xmas Bash to see what I mean.

This site is great for events, but I think the model could be expanded to almost anything.

For example, you could do the same thing but for retail items. You have your friends list, and can easily see what items your friends have bought, comment on them, say you’ve got them too etc. You could very easily tie this in to a Digg style ratings model as well, as well as some kind of PriceRunner price monitor engine which would provide an obvious, easy business model.

As an aside, I find it a bit strange that Upcoming – a site seemingly without a revenue source currently – hasn’t partnered up with someone like TicketMaster to sell gig tickets. Seems like easy money to me…

It’s not a million miles away from what Last.fm does, but it would be interesting to see how this would work for both music and films – both cinema trips and DVDs/downloads in the latter case. Last.fm does very nicely with music recommendations based on what you’ve played, and it certainly has a lot of features that cover this kind of functionality, but their simply doesn’t seem to be a large community that are interested in using Last.fm for that purpose – discussing music, albums and bands.

Last.fm is an interesting one really – it’s obviously a popular site, but it really seems to have suffered from “featureitis”; it simply does too much. I know nobody that actually uses it (or at least has told me they use it), and I work for a record label – everybody their is listening to music every day, and really are Last.fm’s prime target audience.

I suppose the concept I’m talking about is almost akin to adding blog-style comments to almost any “object” – whether that’s a physical object like a CD, or a theoretical object like a gig – coupled with some form of centralised friends list and ratings system. This would ideally be paired with user generated content to have things to talk about in the first place.

Their are quite a few interesting sites out there that apply an interesting model to the problem they’re trying to solve – I wonder if any others could be used in an interesting way for more general problems…