Incoming!

New Scrapbook, Deleting Events, and Hack Day

Some cool Yahoo! Open Hack Day projects using Upcoming.org inspired us to do a quick redesign of the Past Events page. Plus, you can now delete newly-created events and venues.

New Scrapbook

Once you've attended an event, there's now a better reason to go back and tag your Flickr photos - the Scrapbook! We've had a pretty bare "Past Events" section for some time now, but we've really wanted to make it more fun as a way to collect memories of your outings and adventures.
Inspired by the recent Hack Day, we decided to take a first pass at making a scrapbook out of your event history. To make sure that it's easy and quick to browse through your past events, we put monthly navigation at the bottom. It should let you get to old events quickly, and also keeps the page from getting too large if you've got a long history. Months in which you didn't watch or attend anything don't appear.
We also added in up to 9 recent Flickr photos from every event you've watched or attended in a particular month, up at the top. When you mouseover a photo, it should highlight the event that it's from. It adds some visual memories to the pages, and also is a fun way to keep track of Flickr photos posted to events that you've been to recently.

Deleting Events/Venues

Accidentally added an event or venue? You'll be glad to know you can finally delete events you've created that nobody's attending yet and venues with no corresponding events. Why not allow deleting events with attendees? Well, that means one person's actions could kill the social interaction around an event... All the comments, photos, and attendees would disappear permanently. Don't worry -- we'll be adding a way to cancel events that have already become active.

Hacking Upcoming

When we weren't seeing Beck or playing Guitar Hero at Hack Day, we were busy watching demos and helping people make beautiful things with the Upcoming API. Out of 54 demos, eight of them mashed up Upcoming in some way, which makes us happy. Here are the ones that were made public.

• Gutentag helps you find other people like yourself and the events they're attending, based on the tags you've added to your own profile. (Josh Dewald, Taylor Dondich, Mabel Liang)



• The guys from mobile startup Mozes built a "Mobile Upcoming" SMS hack. To try it, text "upcoming event name" to 66937 (MOZES), with the name of the event. Mozes will respond with the event details, including time and address. (Andy Stack, Adrian Tymes)



• Invite Windows/MSN Live Contacts allows users to invite their MSN contacts to Upcoming.org events they're attending. (Sudarshan Gaikaiwari)

At Hack Day, we also met Fabricio Zuardi, creator of the excellent CCHits website, which gathers the best Creative Commons-licensed music. On Monday, we were excited to see he added Upcoming integration using the Flickr tagging standard. For example, this song shows that Ryan Smith will be playing at an Upcoming event. Nice.