My friend [lk:nonecknoel.com|Noel] pointed me towards [lk:upcoming.org] yesterday morning as I was in the middle of some data wrangling, and i didn't get to look into it much until later in the day at which point I was kind of BLOWN AWAY. What they have done almost seems to be inspired by an article that I earlier pointed out. Here is a quote:
[l:http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html|Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?] and then [l:http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html|"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up... I said, instead of trying to build some all-singing all-dancing "collaboration server" where you're going to throw in all kinds of ridiculous line items like bulletin boards and task tracking and other shit, let's suppose you narrow your focus to just calendars.]

This is what [lk:upcoming.org|upcoming] has done. It is a huge shared calendar of events. International! And it is well organized into "metros" which are basically cities, or smaller geographic units (there is one for NYU). And folks post events, then other users can "watch" and event, meaning stick it on a watch list, and then indicate that they are going to attend an event. Users can email event listings to friends so friends can then put it on their watch list or decide to attend it. The event listings can then be pulled via RSS onto a user's own website.

Coming soon to my site: "events i am watching" and "events i am attending" blocks.

Meetup is dead! Long Live Upcoming.org!

So if all that is not exciting enough, it gets better... Folks are already developing upcoming modules for Drupal (civicspace). Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that you can tag events and add comments to help classify them. I think i might just cancel my [l:http://www.timeoutny.com|TONY] subscription....

[http://www.orient-lodge.com/index.php?q=node/view/296|Aldon Hynes] also blogs about Upcoming today (or yesterday). Thanks for the shout out Aldon, right back at ya'!.