Review: Eventful.com
Over the past month or so I’ve been trying out the new Eventful service that I found out about on Tech Crunch. The idea behind Eventful is to allow people to connect with events, whether in their local area or further afield. Data is available on each event with separate sections for performers, venues, links and calendars. Eventful also lets people tag and comment on events. There is an API that will allow people to take events and put them on their own site as well as create mashups from Eventful data.
Dan Farber has just put up an interesting podcast with Eventful founder Brian Dear describing his goals and aims for the service.
So given that I have been trialling this for over a month how does it look? Well firstly I have to say that I am impressed with the features that Eventful provides, particularly the capability to upload images for all sections of the site. The other feature that I particularly like is the ability to add rich data about events, performers and venues including links to official or unofficial sites, pictures and comments. The calendar feature is adequate and the feeds available from the site do the job quite nicely. Compared to competitors like upcoming.org Eventful is a clear winner.
The other thing that you want from an event site is a good selection of events to choose from that in turn creates a good community adding and tagging events to go to. I have to say that for Adelaide where I live that upcoming.org does have the edge, particularly in live music. Hopefully that will change. Eventful have done a deal with meetup.com to add their meetups to eventful but apart from meetups there are only the events I have added in Adelaide. On the flipside Eventful does publish events to other sites when you add them (including upcoming.org) so you are not missing out on potential reach by listing your events there.
I do have to say that I have encountered a few bugs with the site, mostly around things not displaying correctly. I also encountered one problem with Eventful submitting events to other sites. Each time I dutifully submitted a bug report and had prompt attention from their tech support within a day or two, top marks for responsiveness. The only other gripe I have is that their group feature is not secure, anyone finding out the URL of your group can add events to it whether you want them to or not. If you use their API the URL of the group is sitting right there in the source of your page for anyone to see so this isn’t so good. I have assurances that this issue is on their list of things to fix. There are a few issues with Australian addresses which can be worked around if you remember to put your city or town in the city field and the suburb in the address body.
All in all I would reccommend Eventful to people, it has a load of great features and the bugs don’t detract from its usefulness too much, especially when you factor in responsive tech support.
