getluky.net

It’s been a while since I posted anything about my development work on Upcoming.org, but that’s because all the work has been behind closed doors! In any case, please check out the humongous social feature of Groups that we’ve been working hard to deliver.

Upcoming.org Groups Index page! SoCal Indie Rock Group

Seriously, this feature has been in the works for months, as myself, Andy, and Leonard have put in some hardcore free time trying to make this feature really great. It definitely still could use some polishing up, especially the moderation pages, but we figured that it was time to let it loose and see what people use it for!

My dream is that it will transform Upcoming from a site where you simply syndicate and leave it alone, into a real community of interaction around interesting events, where you can actually hold discussions through Group Discussion Topics that will act kinda like interest newsgroups do. Because we center all groups around event lists, I think it will really hit that sweet spot that Meetup once provided, while giving everyone all that tasty Web 2.0 goodness that you’ve come to expect from us Upcoming folks.

One of the more interesting things that we’ve done is basically allow you to work with your groups on two axes - private/public and moderated/unmoderated. The privacy factor allows you to start up groups just for you, your friends, and your family, while the moderation lets anyone have fine grained control over their group, if they so desire.

It’s our hope that everything “just works” the way you expect it to. It’s really fascinating to get behind the scenes in social software and start coding, because all of the issues surrounding privacy, approval, leadership, etc. typically are simply understood implicitly by everyone, because that’s how we organize groups of people in the real world, without really thinking about it. But when you encode all those social rules into a living, breathing community site, it requires quite a bit of thought and planning to make it work. I definitely have a lot of respect for the Flickr folks after taking a stab at devising the backend to our groups system! It takes a lot to make relationship-based software work right.

So with that major release done, i’ve gone through and fixed a lot of the low-hanging fruit on the Community wiki Bug Reports page. I’ve just been dying to get these major code changes out so that we can fix these little things! I’m glad to be making progress.

So go out there, and make some groups! Have a discussion or two, and let us know what you think.