[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 :)