Disclosure: 1st non-founding employee at Upcoming.
Neither Eventful nor Zvents plugs into a social network to tell you stuff your friends are going to, or thinking of going to. They are just sites that list events.
Facebook's events app is 100% social - it tells you what your friends are doing, and you can follow artists and venues. There are comments and such on events. It is also good for non-public, informal events, something Upcoming didn't do very well. But Facebook is useless for searching for events in your area, or for following a particular genre of music or type of event.
Upcoming was sort of in the middle of all of this. Which was part of the problem. It was hard to know what to focus on. I'm not sure the story is entirely that Yahoo was solely to blame for fucking it up. We also made some incorrect decisions. But unquestionably, Yahoo didn't give us the resources to succeed, and prioritized things that had nothing to do with success.
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It always sucks to have something you worked so hard on (your baby) canned or messed around with for non-technical reasons.
Your elucidation of Upcoming's differences helps explain why I probably quit using it, though. While I can see the value in having your social network plugged into a facet of (if not your entire) calendar, I personally choose not to participate in third party social networks. If Upcoming required a Facebook (or just about any other social network) login, I would have stopped using it. And yes, I realize I'm in the minority :)
Thanks but I don't feel any "loss". It's just a website. Even if it had been a smashing success, by now it would either have evolved into something else or died a natural death.
It was a loss of time for me, maybe, but I was well compensated. The real losers were all the community members who built it into something.
Neither Eventful nor Zvents plugs into a social network to tell you stuff your friends are going to, or thinking of going to. They are just sites that list events.
Facebook's events app is 100% social - it tells you what your friends are doing, and you can follow artists and venues. There are comments and such on events. It is also good for non-public, informal events, something Upcoming didn't do very well. But Facebook is useless for searching for events in your area, or for following a particular genre of music or type of event.
Upcoming was sort of in the middle of all of this. Which was part of the problem. It was hard to know what to focus on. I'm not sure the story is entirely that Yahoo was solely to blame for fucking it up. We also made some incorrect decisions. But unquestionably, Yahoo didn't give us the resources to succeed, and prioritized things that had nothing to do with success.