Upcoming

Upcoming

Upcoming homepage in April 2007
Type of site
 Events, Social Networking
Owner Yahoo!
Created by Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin
Commercial Yes
Registration Not required
Launched September 19, 2003
Current status Closed April 30, 2013

Upcoming (formerly Upcoming.org) was a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio.[1] On October 4, 2005, Upcoming.org was acquired by Yahoo!.[2][3] In April 2013, Yahoo announced the retirement of Upcoming.[4]

In May 2014, Andy Baio announced a Kickstarter campaign to relaunch the site, successfully raising the $30,000 goal.[5]

Features

Upcoming combined features of an event calendar and a social networking site.[6] Primarily, the site was a searchable, browseable repository of upcoming events, such as art exhibits, conferences, and music concerts. Event information was primarily contributed by the user community, although in its later years, an increasing percentage of event data originated from commercial sources. Users could indicate their plans by marking that they were "watching" or "going" to an event. Users could also establish "friend" relationships with each other and receive notifications about what their friends were attending.[7] Upcoming also offered users reminders via email or SMS when a particular event was about to occur.

The site switched to the Yahoo! user accounts system in early 2007, and changed its domain name to upcoming.yahoo.com. At the same time, the site formally changed its name from "Upcoming.org" to simply "Upcoming".[8][9] Despite this, many users of the site still link to and refer to the site as "Upcoming.org".

Upcoming used iCalendar, GeoRSS, and RSS for content syndication and supported an open API for searching or submitting event data. It also used hCalendar microformats, so that events can be downloaded directly into calendar applications.[10] Finally, users could also post badges on their own websites, powered by javascript, which listed all their Upcoming events.

Community

Upcoming homepage in October 2008

As of 2008, the overwhelming majority of users and events were located in North America, particularly among fans of independent music, web technologists, and the San Francisco Bay Area. However, Upcoming users could be found almost anywhere on the globe,[11] often submitting event data in their local language. Upcoming was fully capable of storing and searching multilingual content, although the site sported only a US-English interface.

Competitors and influence

A close competitor, known as Eventful, has emerged since Upcoming was launched in 2003. Some music sites later branched out into this space as well, such as iLike and last.fm, building on their knowledge of their users' tastes. Facebook's event system is very much like a simplified version of Upcoming's, although it is more typically used for informal or private get-togethers. Other competitors in the events calendar space include EventSetter.com and Zvents.com, which was acquired by StubHub in December 2011.

Relaunch

On the 7th May 2014, Andy Baio launched a Kickstarter campaign to re-launch upcoming.org independently of Yahoo!,[5] which had offered upcoming.org to Baio for purchase following the closure of the website. Within 90 minutes of launch, the project reached its $30,000 funding target. Baio wrote on the launch page for the Kickstarter funding effort, "Like many of the people that used it, I miss Upcoming. Nothing's come to replace it in the years since, and I have the same problems that motivated me to build it a decade ago -- I'm missing interesting events in my city and struggling to discover interesting events when I travel."[12]

References

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