In my further delvings into social networking sites (okay, web 2.0 sites - it’s just that, well, that term is so, you know, bah!), I resurrected my account with upcoming.org. I haven’t looked at it for quite some time - such a long time, in fact, that I couldn’t even remember the URL (or should that be URI?) Fortunately the only person I know who appears to use it regularly is Mike so I always know where I can find a link. What’s more useful is that, as he mentioned here a while ago, he’s going to be reviewing the Neubauten gig in Nottingham at the end of April so woohoo, I can add myself to that event. Great, smashing, super.

However, things started to go downhill a little after that. I amended an event from last year which is also taking place this year on account of being an annual event. The site so far doesn’t cater for this. Then I added another event, namely the Oxfam Trailwalker which I’m doing in July. The “venue” for this location is the South Downs Way which stretches from Winchester to Eastbourne. But the site won’t let me add an event unless I’ve added a full venue (including postcode). What’s more, it requires me to add it to a “metro”, short for Metropolitan Area. This isn’t so bad and it even offers a nice type ahead feature to let you look up from all the available metros.

Yes, that’s right - all the available metros. From provinces in Azerbaijan to counties in Wyoming. It’s a times like this when a nice drop down list would be quite useful. A nice filtered drop down list that let me start with just browsing metros in the UK. Using AJAX is all well and good but if it doesn’t add to the user experience, there’s no point. As it happens, I’ve added this to the Brighton metro because I couldn’t find one for South of England (or even England - South, or whatever other variation). For that matter, the type ahead wouldn’t return a metro one England, or even one for the whole of the United Kingdom.

Browsing the UK metros list just now, I also notice that there’s no rhyme or reason to the listing which has obviously been mostly added by users. For example, it’s a mix of counties and cities, as well as having entries for locations such as the “East Riding of Yorkshire” as well as Lostwithiel and South Kesteven which I could have sworn were made up names. And I’m sure that our Gaelic friends will be pleased no end with finding that Ireland is part of the United Kingdom now too.

The counties and countries that make up the UK are, to all extensive purposes, pretty static. It wouldn’t take much to predefine some metros based on these locations along with some cities just to populate the list and then let users add one or perhaps two more levels of sub categories to add further granularity. (I’ve no idea if that’s the right word to use in this context but it’ll do).

But that’s nothing compared to the search! If you click on the link for “Places” at the top of the page, you get presented with exactly that - a list of places, in various states of capitalization and not in alphabetical order. Yes, you read that correctly - NOT in alphabetical order. Still, that doesn’t matter if we’re trying to find a particular event does it because no matter what the state of the entries, you can always find an event by date because that’s the great thing about events isn’t it. They happen on specified dates which, you know, you can search by. So, click on the “Explore Events” list and voila, a list of events. In date order. I wonder if someone else has put in an entry for the Trailwalker event? The search isn’t returning anything but just to be sure, I’ll click on the “Go to date” link… the “go to date” link… there must be a “go to date” link here… well, if there is, it’s very well camoflauged.

The search by date options seem limited to one long list of dates with absolutely no option filter by country, region, type of event or, god forbid, even the user defined metros. All I need to do is go forward x number of pages until I get to the middle of July and I can see globally what’s happening on that weekend. Except (you knew there was going to be an except didn’t you. You could feel it in your waters) for one thing: the list of events only goes for 249 pages and takes you as far as April 2nd. Or possibly April 1st. I can’t tell you for certain because after 240+ pages, the system seems to have lost count and events on Apr 1 and Apr 2 are mixed up. For the life of me, I can’t see a reason why this should be.

I know I said you can’t filter the list of events by user defined metros but it turns out that you can browse the events for any given metro by date order if you go through the Places link and navigate to the list of metros (although the metro list doesn’t show if there are events from the top level view, just the number of users). And look, there, on the metro page! It’s a “go to date” link (well, a “Pick another day” link) This is handy because if I go to the Brighton metro and choose the Brighton and Hove city option (don’t ask, just don’t.) and pick the date of my event, I can see my event. Now, if I wanted to check to see if anyone else had added it at all, I can go into every other possible metro option (winchester and, um…), navigate to that date and see what’s been put in. (Incidentally, every time I go into upcoming.org, I get offered the chance to join the Guildford metro as it’s… actually I don’t know why - it’s not like I live anywhere near by. I get the impression that a lot of people have been asked to join the Guildford metro because it has 469 users and no events. That’s the Hampshire Guildford metro anyway, not the Surrey Guildford which has 492 users and no events.)

I notice that Yahoo now own Upcoming so it would be nice to think that they’ll actually get around to spending some time and money improving it. It is potentially a very useful site but in my opinion suffers from badly thought out functionality. As a personal calendar it might be quite handy but the lack of any useful means of searching for events by date in particular, plus the absence of any type of regionalized filtering options means that Upcoming.org is all but useless as a social networking tool (I live in the UK, I work in the UK, I play in the UK. It’s nice that there’s going to be a Jaycees meeting in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota tonight but quite frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck because I live in the UK and it’s clogging up my search options!).

Still, it’s out there and people are using it. But if I want to add a list of events to my site, I should probably roll my own calendar. On the other hand, perhaps there’s a need for an improved version of a social calendaring tool which could make for an interesting project. Unless, that is, anyone knows of any other sites which offer comparable functionality.