Upcoming.org adds Yahoo! Local Events, Flickr integration, Geotargeting
Andy, Leonard and I have been operating in two modes since last Wednesday: Sleep and Awesome.
As a result, we’re happy to announce a lot of new features on our news blog. The huge one is a fundamental strategic addition to Upcoming.org - that is, letting our users browse through and hand-pick Yahoo! Local events. Local’s got an incredible amount of data, and as far as finding stuff to do goes, it’s really, really good. We’ve also never let users apply so many filters on-the-fly before, so it should be much more effective for drilling down to what you’re interested in.
In combination with Geotargeting, we’re able to serve events to people from all over the globe! This includes places that aren’t really well-populated, which would have looked pretty empty to Upcoming.org users before.
The reason these are key moves in strategy for us is that it makes it much, much easier to come into Upcoming.org from a metro without many people, and instantly make some use out of it. It literally takes one click to “discover” a great event, and bring it into your Events and all of your friends’ views. And as soon as users start watching or attending events, we’ll be able to tell everyone about the additional interesting stuff!
Also, Flickr photos are now also showing up on Upcoming.org pages whenever they’ve been tagged as recommended on the event pages. It’s been a long time coming, and the new layout of the event page gave us the space to insert them in a pretty clean way.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the help of several hard workers from Yahoo! Local and Flickr. It’s been a great first step into taking full advantage of our acquisition almost a year ago. We’re not done by any means, but we hope that you enjoy the recent changes and will continue using Upcoming.org as we make it better.