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Making services more useful 1- events & calendars

This is great - in the midst of a rant about how various services just aren’t providing the openness and extensibility I require, Niall IM’ed that MeetUp wants to start charging. Via con dios, baby.

In lieu of blogging I’ve been geeking. I’ve been at more dumb calendar stuff over the last weeks. This feels like untangling a huge ball of tangled yarn, coming home to find the cat stretched it all over the house and around the furniture.

This weekend, my adventures in REST to port my non-standard (and unvalidatable) structured blogging experimental event cal to Upcoming.org hit a wall. Sure, upcoming’s got an api, but, as Mike finally deciphered, they have a hard-coded venue system, which makes mass uploading (think pushing from ical) almost impossible without some kind of preprocessing. Unless of course I jettison their structure entirely and post everything under the non-useful “bay area” venue.

So MeetUp’s news hits me when just as I’ve been mulling their flaws, as they use the same venue paradigm as Upcoming’s — a model I thought just as lame back when Mike was trying to do blogging meet ups years ago. What a pain. Not only did you have to log in to see anything, but you had to pay to add a new venue and some of the venues listed weren’t happy about being on the list, as it led to unexpected swarms. Blah blah.

It’s the same debate we see in tagging: do we use hardcoded structure or let one emerge? In many ways hardcoding is mooted by how much more effective search has become. Who cares whether I say SF or San Francisco? The Westin St. Francis or the St. Francis? This is where GPS would help — that’s the only hardcoding I can accept as adding value.

I love the idea of a published calendar, but really think that a simple ical is the easiest. No social networking, no searching, no appearance in a central way - but it’s a hell of a lot easier for me. Hcal might work, yes, but it is right now a standard sans implementation.

People say what about evdb? Sure, they say they’re gonna support everything, but right now don’t have an api. Fundamentally, it’s like all these other nascent projects: it’s impossible to know what will be done when, what promise fulfilled and what positioning staked out.

And what a problem to have! It’s remarkable - I could have a blog just of the interesting new project du jour. In calendars, there are Mosuki and Whizspark, which add more of the social networking aspect. Whizspark is more clearly an Evite chaser, with its notification lists and ability to accept payments. And if there’s another company that annoys me, it’s Evite - so I’ll be happy to try this out. Evite *really* needs to send basic info as text in the body of the email; anyone sending out just a link with no context suffers a high likelihood of going unread.

It’s clear we’re deep in the remix culture, a “let 100 (thousand) flowers bloom” period of mismash api ferment. I could spend all my time in a state of kitty-like distraction tracking all these small, single guy web-based projects — of which the stellar Paul Rademacher GMaps-Craigslist mashup app, Scuttle (a personal del.ico.us), and Trendmapper are just a few. No wonder I’ve been scattered.

What in the heck does it all mean? Have projects, apps and companies themselves gone long tail? If these things are so cheap to get up and running, will we always have 50 alternatives? What about critical mass? What about people who don’t want to keep up with this bake-off?

The amazing thing about all these tools - and innovation itself right now - is that it’s become so personal. It’s become a question of whether it works for me, despite the fact that I can see there are great ideas here and we’re breaking new ground. I rant here about how Evite and MeetUp don’t meet my needs, ignoring the wider innovations they’ve brought. Why do we have such public outflow of criticisms and feature requests for what remain essentially lab projects? Arguably that’s what’s driving the world of tech blogging. What is it that’s made it so tantalizingly close to what we want that we will take projects to task for the few ways in which they don’t match up? This is a pretty big change, and one that just hit me last night when Mary Hodder reminded me of her NetNewsWire controversy from a million years ago. We feel ownership of these projects — to attack, defend, enhance, and “own”.

Part of it might be because it’s all so hard to “get”. Understanding the pros-cons of each project is difficult because they are subtle and there are usually a dozen flavors. Throw in the fact that we’re used to being marketed to as consumers, expecting to be told who this stuff is right for and the setting is ripe for religion.

These aren’t really companies that market themselves and field products; they’re itches being publicly scratched. So we look to blogs, where people like me discuss nits (because it’s about the nits), but what I hate may work well for your needs. Fortunately for those who can code, much of this is remixable into personal flavors. But not everyone. Even though I know it’s good for me, I find myself stretched too thin by exploring AJAX, icky javascript, and the viccissitudes of XML over HTTP.