[bsimpson]

It seems like there are three obvious divisions of the Facebook product:

- Chat

- Shared content (news feed/photos/etc)

- Events

I wonder what the world looks like in which each is treated as a separate product with a common login. I imagine that the size of the user base goes up, but total usage could go down.

I know many people who don't have Facebook because they don't like the constant distraction of its shared content core, but would be open to using it for chat and events (if only because everyone else is). At the same time, there are probably existing users who haven't abandoned it yet because of events/chat, but would like to be less distracted by the content stream. If someone could install only Messenger and Events, effectively opting into those two products and out of Paper, it's not hard to imagine a sizable subset of the Facebook population doing exactly that.

[a8000]

I think a startup focussing on only events and doing them well could have some potential.

[buro9]

http://attending.io/ is doing this.

They're focusing on the market below EventBrite, small free events and small venue (i.e. tech user talks) that may require a small fee.

It's really refreshing to be able to just say "I want to attend that event" and for it to be a few clicks rather than an arduous check-out process.

Note: Whilst they have a "browse" button at the top, they've started by providing stand-alone pages that act as a flyer and mini-promo site for the event... this is a tool with great potential, not a fully mature product. Example of an event page http://attending.io/events/how-to-market-through-influencers...

[debt]

I feel like hosting events is trivial. It's finding the events that is difficult. It's trivial to get a stripped down ticketing system going, it's much harder to get people to see those events.

I'm surprised there's still not a Google for events.

[TillE]

> I'm surprised there's still not a Google for events.

Absolutely. What's going on in Berlin next weekend? To answer that question depending on my interests, I need to check half a dozen different sites, none of them very good or filterable in useful ways.

I want to do more fun and interesting stuff, you want to promote your event. It seems like an obvious opportunity for anyone who can at least improve upon the clunky Web 1.0 interface of existing sites.

[boomzilla]

I've been mulling over this idea for a while now and actually have implemented a prototype. The current roadblock I run into, as someone said earlier in the thread, is the data sources. I've implemented a crawler that pulls from roughly 10 different sites, but clearly the custom crawling doesn't scale: there are just too many websites out there, and I don't have access to the crawling infrastructure of the Google/Bing size (both machine power and development effort).

I am thinking of making my prototype more human involved. For example, users (like you) could list the sites they often check for events, and maybe give the system some cue on how to extract the events from those sites. Another approach is MTurk which is something I'll try next.

[visakanv]

Yeah, this definitely seems like the inevitable future. Google, what bands will be in Y (town) during X period? It almost feels primitive and painfully slow that we do what we do now.

[otisfunkmeyer]

I think this is without question analogous to Stripe. As pg said, the reason Stripe was able to succeed is that no one else was willing to do it: it was too obviously hard. The mountain that would need to be climbed was apparent from the start.

I think this one is similar. Aggregating all of these events for all of these niches from all of these websites is just both so obviously needed and so obviously difficult that no one has wo/man'd up to do it (at least as far as we know).

I have lamented on this one since at least 2007 when Yahoo bought that startup that was trying to do exactly this (can't remember the name).

One day it will happen and the world will be quite a bit better. Obviously :)

[rhizome]

Here is the information you requested, part the infinity:

http://unicornfree.com/2014/fuck-innovation-take-2-the-obvio...

[superuser2]

Why?

Everyone I know has Facebook and uses it frequently. No one I know uses email unless absolutely necessary. No one I know is interested in recreating identities and friendship mappings across a bunch of discrete apps.

[a8000]

Events in the sense of: Here are all the queer reggae parties in Birmingham tonight/the next three months displayed on a map. If you decide to attend, get a semianonymous link you can send to all your friends by whatever method you chose, they can decide to attend simply by adding themselves to the list. Basically like doodle.com but with public location sensitive event listing. No signup or authentification required. There is no good reason to tighly couple all this to a online friendlist, you can just as easily manage your friends with an offline contact list that is synced to all your devices and use email/im to communicate.

[dethstar]

Perhaps http://www.gethotspotapp.com/