Journal tags: upcoming

Remember when I was bitching and moaning about the way that search works on Upcoming? Well, it looks like my whining has paid off. As of today, search is fixed.

Thank you, relevant Yahoo employees.

As a web developer, I get annoyed by interaction design implementations all the time: Why is that a link instead of a form button?, Why doesn’t that scale when I bump up the font size?, Why am I being asked to enter this unnecessary information?… Usually I can brush off these annoyances and continue my journey along the threads of the World Wide Web but there’s one “feature” that has irked me to point of distraction and it’s all the more irritating for being on a site I use habitually: Upcoming.

As an Upcoming user, I have a default location. In my case it’s Brighton. This location is important. My location determines what content gets served up to me on the front page of the site—a useful way of discovering local events of interest.

The site also has a search feature. The search form has two components: what I’m searching for and where I’m searching for it. The “where” field defaults to my location, which is a handy little touch. If I want to search for something outside my current location—say the Future of Web Design conference in London this April—I can enter “Future of Web Design” in the “what” field and delete “Brighton” from the “where” field, replacing it with “London”. That works: I have now narrowed down my search to the location “London.”

Here’s the problem: if I now return to the front page I will find that my location is London. That’s right: simply by searching in a place, the system assumes that I now want that to be my location. You know what they say about assumptions, right? In this case, not only has it made an ass out of me, it has, over time, instilled a fear of searching.

I’ll be in San Francisco at the end of this month so I’d like to see what’s going on while I’m there. But once I’ve finished my searching I must remember to reset my location back to Brighton. Knowing this makes me hesitant to use the search form. No doubt the justification for this unexpected behaviour in the search is to second-guess what people really want: do as I want, not as I say. But when I search, I really just want to search. I suspect the same is true of most people.

Normally I wouldn’t rant about an obviously-flawed feature but in this case it’s a feature that can be easily fixed by simply being removed. Here is the current flow:

1. The user enters a search term in the “what” field, a location in the “where” field and submits the search form.
2. The system returns a list of search results for the specified term in the specified place.
3. The system changes the user’s location to the specified place.

That third step is completely unnecessary. Its omission would not harm the search functionality one whit and it would make the search interface more truthful and less duplicitous.

I’ve already mentioned this on the Upcoming suggestion board. If you can think of a good reason why the current behaviour should stay, please add your justification there. If, like me, you’d like to see a search feature that actually just searches, please let your voice be heard there too.

Please Leonard, , I kvetch because I care. I use Upcoming all the time. It would be a butt-kicking service if it weren’t for this one glaring flaw… even without a liquid layout.

Update: Fixed!

Here’s a list of websites on which I have an account and which involve some form of social networking. I’m listing them in order of how often I visit. I’m also listing how many contacts/buddies/friends/connections/people I have on each site.

My Social Networks

Website	Visits	Connections
Flickr	Daily	154
Twitter	Daily	205
Del.icio.us	Daily	4
Upcoming	Frequently	95
Last.fm	Frequently	66
Dopplr	Frequently	96
Jaiku	Weekly	34
Anobii	Weekly	2
Corkd	Infrequently	27
Pownce	Infrequently	22
Revish	Infrequenty	9
Ficlets	Infrequently	4
Newsvine	Infrequently	4
Facebook	Infrequently	59
Ma.gnolia	Rarely	7
Linked in	Rarely	90
Odeo	Rarely	10
Xing	Never	2
Digg	Never	0

This is just a snapshot of activity so some of the data may be slightly skewed. Pownce, for instance, is quite a new site so my visits may increase or decrease dramatically over time. Also, though I’ve listed Del.icio.us as a daily visit, it’s really just the bookmarklet or Adactio Elsewhere that I use every day—I hardly ever visit the site itself.

Other sites that I visit on a daily basis don’t have a social networking component: blogs, news sites, Technorati, The Session (hmmm… must do something about that).

In general, the more often I use a service, the more likely I am to have many connections there. But there are some glaring exceptions. I have hardly any connections on Del.icio.us because the social networking aspect is fairly tangential to the site’s main purpose.

More interestingly, there are some exceptions that run in the other direction. I have lots of connections on Linked in and Facebook but I don’t use them much at all. In the case of Linked in, that’s because I don’t really have any incentive. I’m sure it would be a different story if I were looking for a job.

As for Facebook, I really don’t like the way it tries to be a one-stop shop for everything. It feels like a walled garden to me. I much prefer services that choose to do one thing but do it really well:

• Flickr for photos,
• Dopplr for travel,
• Del.icio.us for bookmarks,
• Upcoming for events and
• Last.fm for music.

Mind you, there’s now some crossover in the events space when the events are musical in nature. The next Salter Cane concert is on Last.fm but it links off to the Upcoming event … which then loops back to Last.fm.

I haven’t settled on a book reading site yet. It’s a toss-up between Anobbii and Revish. It could go either way. One of the deciding factors will be how many of friends use each service. That’s the reason why I use Twitter more than Jaiku. Jaiku is superior in almost every way but more of my friends use Twitter. Inertia keeps me on Twitter. It’s probably just inertia that keeps me Del.icio.us rather than Ma.gnolia.

The sum total of all my connections on all these services comes to 890. But of course most of these are the same people showing up on different sites. I reckon the total amount of individual people doesn’t exceed 250. Of that, there’s probably a core of 50 people who I have connected to on at least 5 services. It’s for these people that I would really, really like to have portable social networks.

Each one of the services I’ve listed should follow these three steps. In order of difficulty:

1. Provide a publicly addressable list of my connections. Nearly all the sites listed already do this.
2. Mark up the list of connections with hCard and, where appropriate, XFN. Twitter, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Pownce, Cork’d and Upcoming already do this.
3. Provide a form with a field to paste the URL of another service where I have suitably marked-up connections. Parse and attempt to import connections found there.

That last step is the tricky one. Dopplr is the first site to attempt this. That’s the way to do it. Other social networking sites, take note.

It’s time that social networking sites really made an effort to allow not just the free flow of data, but also the free flow of relationships.

Upcoming.org has rolled out some changes. The visual design has been tweaked, particularly on the events pages.

The colours and typography are looking very good indeed. The change to the way attendees are listed inline doesn’t work quite as well. I’m not the only one who thinks so. But instead of just bitching about it like me, others have provided mockups as part of their constructive criticism.

While this latest update is one of the biggest changes that has been rolled out on the site, it certainly isn’t the first. In fact, Upcoming seems to be in a constant state of gradual change and improvement.

There’s a lot of talk these days about iterative design, but Upcoming is one of the few places where I’ve noticed it in action. The design has been improving gradually and almost imperceptibly. Did anyone notice when the top banner changed from being a solid colour to a gradient? I wish now that I had taken screenshots of Upcoming every few weeks. They would make for an interesting time-lapse movie.

The Yahooiness of Upcoming is beginning to make itself felt. You can now migrate your Flickr buddy icon over to Upcoming. Also, if you tag photos on Flickr with “upcoming:event={event id}”, they will show up on the corresponding event page. Then there’s the maps integration.

Both Upcoming and Flickr are now making use of Yahoo maps. The Flickr map exploration page is, like so many things on Flickr, a real time-sink. It’s fun browsing photos with the added context of location.

But — and it’s a big but — Yahoo’s mapping data for Europe is particularly poor. So don’t expect too much detail when you’re browsing holiday snapshots from Brighton. I blame crown copyright myself (though I do wonder how Google has managed to get such detailed data).

As part of this latest iteration, Flickr are moving away from using tags for geocoding:

As a bonus there will be no more need for the unsightly “geotagged/geo:lat/geo:long” tags cluttering up your photos - we’ll offer an automated way to remove them all once the development community has had a chance to make the necessary changes to their code.

I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with using visible geographical co-ordinates. I’d prefer to keep my meta-data visible, thank you very much.

At the risk of becoming API-watch Central, I feel I must point out some nifty new features that have been added to Upcoming.org.

Andy and the gang have been diligently geotagging events using Yahoo’s geocoder API. Best of all, these latitude and longitude co-ordinates are now also being exposed through the API. Methinks Adactio Austin won’t be the last mashing up of event and map data I’ll be doing.

On the Upcoming site itself, you can now limit the number of attendees for an event, edit any venues you’ve added and edit your comments. This comes just a few days after Brian Suda mentioned in a chat that he would like to have the option to edit this comment later (right now he’s looking for somewhere to stay during XTech).

Feature wished for; feature added. This is exactly the kind of iterative, evolutionary growth that goes a long way towards what Kathy Sierra calls creating passionate users. By all accounts, her panel at South by Southwest was nothing short of outstanding. Everyone I spoke to who attended was raving about it for days. Muggins here missed it but I have a good excuse. I was busy signing freshly-purchased books, so I can’t complain.