The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-of-upcomingorg

by mxfh • 12 years ago

139 52 12 years ago

cromulent• 12 years ago

Andy is too humble to mention it, but he is an alumni of Kickstarter, joining them in 2008 and was at one point the CTO.

http://waxy.org/2008/09/kickstarter/

mecredis• 12 years ago

Indeed, but he does mention it briefly in the beginning of the video!

Raphael• 12 years ago

What does Upcoming.org do better than Facebook, Google+, and Meetup.com?

tarekmoz• 12 years ago

The page says : ...An open API, an embrace of open standards, and a belief that your data belongs to you...

msie• 12 years ago

Can I build a commercial product on that API without licensing fees or restrictions?

drgath2• 12 years ago

As someone who pays Meetup.com $144 a year for my group, I'd love to have a cheaper alternative.

scelerat• 12 years ago

For starters, it's not Facebook or Google+.

Many people are looking for ways to be less dependent on FB and Google+. If the Upcoming folk shape this the right way, both in product design and pitch, they will capture people who are tired of creepily pervasive social networks but still want to set up events easily.

alaskamiller2• 12 years ago

Who are these magical unicorns? Because it's starting to feel like outrage porn to point out how people just don't want to invite themselves to a Facebook event.

crystaln• 12 years ago

Lots of things. For starters:

Facebook is pretty limited for broad event promotion.

Google+ - really? who is looking for events there?

Meetup.com - expensive and really only for small-medium groups, not events

neilk2• 12 years ago

It's been 10 years since Upcoming was created, and the site is dead right now, so, obviously one answer is "nothing". However, let's timewarp to 2004-2007 or so.

Upcoming created the model for an events site tied to a social network, and since it was first, you could find almost any kind of event from a personal party to a stadium rock concert there.

Upcoming had very broad capabilities for tagging, geotagging, searching, following, and being notified about public events. It really shone for aficionados of particular music scenes in geographic areas, and for people who liked going to tech conferences. And knowing the events your friends are going to - or even thinking about going to - also helped catalyze attendance.

Lots of other products found niches that had special needs (for instance, Lanyrd or EventBrite), and Facebook completely owns casual events like barbecues and stuff. But nobody's done an events site that had quite the same mix of community and capability. Most of the sites who wanted to grab the Upcoming-esque market were focused on monetizing through profiling users, and then selling ads, or special offers for tickets. Seems like it should work, but it doesn't seem to have panned out. (Also, I know this may shock people, but Ticketmaster is really difficult to work with.)

However, it's not the tech capabilities that people really miss, it's the community. And probably most people are betting on Andy Baio. He is a well-trusted person who is a passionate fan of independent art and culture, and has a history of creating wonderful communities - like Upcoming, KickStarter, and XOXO.

Adaptive• 12 years ago

I was upcoming.org user 500 or so and set up the Hong Kong info in it then. It was heartbreaking to see it atrophy and die. Another in the long list of acquisitions that demonstrate the ability of Yahoo's corporate mediocrity to smother good ideas.

If you are uncertain about resuscitating Upcoming, here's a timely anecdote: I ran an annual scrub on my RSS feeds yesterday. Per category dead-feeds are usually around 1-2% (even including hot areas like tech).

This year my local feeds category, which long ago replaced upcoming.org for me, was over 30% dead feeds (from just one year ago). Newspapers, local focus blogs, etc. The category need is still there but through recent attrition of local content sites, failure to deliver from local-content aggregation services, bad content acquisitions (MSNBC/Everyblock's buying spree followed by its failure), the local content category is ready for new entrants.

I wish Andy the best in this and will be backing.

feca5• 12 years ago

Why do they need the funding? I find it dishonest and immoral.

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

Could you elaborate on this? How is this dishonest or immoral?

feca5• 12 years ago

I think the app is not hard to build, so funding is not necessary.

aspidistra2• 12 years ago

There's a section on the page called "Why Kickstarter?"

I don't think there's anything dishonest and immoral about the reasons given there.

aeontech• 12 years ago

You may think it is unnecessary, but I don't see how it is dishonest or immoral. Those are very strong words not supported by any argument.

feca5• 12 years ago

Nobody asked for an argument, and by downvoting any argument on my part was prevented. I can explain why I find it immoral: I think the world has many real and deep problems, and investing in a web application that is not hard to build and solves a superfluous first world problem, is a waste of resources. Conversely, I think profiting from it is dishonest and immoral. You may disagree with my reasoning and you may have a different world view to compare, but the downvotes just terminate the conversation.

feca5• 12 years ago

OK, I think an app this simple doesn't need funding, specially in a world where people die of starvation and malaria. Yet all I get for my observation is downvotes.

aspidistra2• 12 years ago

You didn't mention that you thought the app was simple. You said you thought running crowdfunding for it was dishonest and immoral.

In any case... Parsing 35TB of HTML, JavaScript and images, and then releasing that as structured data, on top of rebuilding a sustainable web service? I don't think it is simple at all. It's not exactly a hackathon project.

feca5• 12 years ago

I think we can debate that point, but what I can't understand is the reason behind the downvotes. Downvoting prevents the debate entirely, and I find it unreasonable.

drgath2• 12 years ago

Reminds me of when I worked at Yahoo, and in 2009 I had to track down someone who worked on Upcoming. I found someone who had Upcoming listed in their Backyard profile, but "Oh, I don't work on that anymore. Last I heard {other person} was working on it." So I tracked down that person, only to hear the same response. Following the chain, four or five people and half a day later I finally found the one person in the entire company who worked on Upcoming.org, but only part-time in a community support role. Having recently started at Yahoo, I quickly began to realize what was wrong.

Luckily things have changed considerably since then, and very happy to see Upcoming being handed back to its creator. Same thing should have happened with Delicious, but when they were looking for a buyer, Yahoo (allegedly) refused to sell it back to Joshua Schachter.

badman_ting• 12 years ago

Why the hell did they bother acquiring it, then? I don't get it.

rhizome• 12 years ago

Competition elimination where Y! thought they might go.

wpietri• 12 years ago

I have know knowledge of this incident. But often corporations don't make sense from the outside because it's really about some hidden state.

E.g., maybe the person who argued for the acquisition left the company, so nobody was around to advocate for it anymore. Or the company's strategy changed, either for sensible reasons or just because there's a new fashion. Or the person in charge of the acquisition is mainly rewarded for buying things, but the people needed to make the integration work are rewarded for something that the acquisition would hinder, so they ignore or sabotage it. Or everybody really meant well, but it was nobody's highest priority, so it just dies a slow death.

evunveot• 12 years ago

It feels good to have a beloved service (potentially) returning, but I believe there's another opportunity here that's being missed. I don't know if it's been tried before, but there's a way to organize a service like this, one that relies completely on user-generated content, that would likely be much more resilient: a cooperative.

Forgive me if this is half-baked. I'm not an expert by any means.

Add a pledge level of, say, $150, with the reward being that you become a founding consumer-member of the upcoming.org co-op. The way co-ops work, the surplus or benefit of the co-op's operations is periodically distributed (as a "patronage dividend") to the members in proportion to their "patronage" of the co-op in that period. In a worker co-op, patronage is usually defined as hours worked and the surplus is basically the profits of the business (cash). In a consumer co-op like a natural food store, a member's patronage is how much they spend in the store, and the patronage dividend comes in the form of lower prices.

You could define patronage in the upcoming.org co-op as participation in the site: contributing content, performing moderation, that sort of thing. The patronage dividend can be distributed in the form of free or discounted admissions to events or other rewards of that sort. Otherwise, it would operate the same as it would as a for-profit corporation (probably ad-supported in some way).

(In case it's not clear, I'm not saying the site should be members-only. Anyone would still be able to have full use the site, but those who pay the $150 membership contribution would just have additional privileges and/or responsibilities.)

As far as operations, it could be a multi-stakeholder co-op, as in a hybrid worker/consumer co-op. There would be two classes of members, one for employees and one for users. Some proportion of seats on the board of directors would be elected by each class (maybe 50/50). The board would then hire managers charged with keeping everything running (monitoring budgets and all that). In that way, the user-members would have a voice in major decisions, via their board vote.

There would be no risk of the founder selling out, because it's a standard part of the by-laws of most co-ops that memberships/votes are non-transferable and the co-op as a whole can't be sold unless it's to an entity that maintains the rights of the members (i.e. another co-op).

The main downsides are more organizational complexity and overhead and the fact that the founder has a much smaller upside potential. In other words, the best-case scenario for the founder is pretty much a stable job.

Obviously a lot of details would have to be worked out, but I can't help thinking that all the talk about building something sustainable for "the community" is pretty rhetorical if you're not willing to actually give the community a stake in it.

neilk2• 12 years ago

Ex-Upcoming employee here. I have no expertise to suggest that a cooperative model can work on the internet, but I agree.

Personally, the experience of watching Upcoming wither and die is what got me first interested in alternative ways to pay for social networks and other community service websites. Co-operatives are one possible model.

denzquix• 12 years ago

As Jason Scott (@textfiles) notes on Twitter, this will be something of a first: with all the old content coming back, Archive Team/archive.org "literally provided a backup of a site while it swapped owners."

smackfu• 12 years ago

Making the two top tiers be sponsorships is interesting. Those raised about half the total so far. I wonder if anyone was thinking, hey, this is a pretty cheap way to get good visibility. Especially the $1000 city sponsorship, since you can just pick big cities like NYC.

tijs• 12 years ago

I was wondering about that. I guess picking the cities would be on a first come, first serve basis... which could get ugly if you find out you can't pick your favorite city -after- you've spent $1000.

jenkinsj• 12 years ago

I really appreciate this: TBL says cool URIs don't change! https://www.dropbox.com/s/2l158c8adnba9nw/Screenshot%202014-... [screenshot]

8ig8• 12 years ago

What did Yahoo! originally pay for Upcoming? I'd guess it was significant. The reason I ask is why the Kickstarter campaign?

L_Rahman• 12 years ago

The Kickstarter campaign appears to be a way for Andy to determine that there is still enough demand for what Upcoming provided for it to be worth building for him.

kellanem2• 12 years ago

Acquisitions were much much smaller in those days.

oliv__• 12 years ago

What's up with the weird digitalized Miles Davis tune in the background?

kellanem2• 12 years ago

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/kind-of-bloo...

mountaineer• 12 years ago

I liked Upcoming and generally am a fan of Andy's work, but doesn't kickstarter frown on these types of projects? Are they making an exception because of Andy's contribution to the site as a prominent leader in the community?

From the Kickstarter guide:

"Kickstarter cannot be used to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking." [1]

From the project:

"Most importantly, it surfaced what your friends were interested in attending. Upcoming was among the first generation of web apps to use the social network for anything beyond Friendster-like connections, helping to define Web 2.0." [2]

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/the-return-o...

waxpancake• 12 years ago

Solid question, and I don't blame you for being skeptical. I went through the normal submission process, and was reviewed by a moderator I don't know and have never met. I very explicitly didn't want any special treatment. I was told it met their guidelines.

My understanding, looking at the recent projects in the Technology and Web categories, is that they've loosened their enforcement of that guideline over the last year. Take a look at a search for "Social" in Technology, and you'll see a bunch of sites/apps that push that guideline: https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?term=social&ca...

I think the fact that Upcoming is, first and foremost, an arts/technology event calendar weighed in its favor over, say, a social network for cats.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

My understanding is that web sites shouldn't be crowd-funded because they have no end, given the need for ongoing hosting, as opposed to products that are a discreet "thing".

ejstronge• 12 years ago

This is the first project I've backed on kickstarter - I often miss events, mostly concerts, that come through and would love to see what other, like-minded people are doing/thinking of doing.

I also like the idea of having a development blog to follow, hopefully similar to what Chris Granger did with Light Table though perhaps with more technical posts. Are there other examples of good development blogs to follow? Ideally, I'd like blogs where the writer explained choices that s/he had to make.

simonw• 12 years ago

If you're currently missing concerts, have you tried http://www.songkick.com/ ?

brianbreslin• 12 years ago

Do you think we will see web app projects being backed like this on kickstarter more often? Imagine geocities or some other site being resucitated using 2014 tech.

The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio

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