The Death of Upcoming.org

Posted by Andy Baio

So, Yahoo’s finally decided to close Upcoming.org, the events community I started nearly ten years ago. And, in Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style, they’re doing it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events.

I knew its closure was inevitable after the infamous sunset slide, but never knew when it would happen. Like a newspaper prepping for a sick celebrity, this obituary’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months, waiting for its sad publication day.

The last five years were hard on Upcoming. After Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, and I left at the end of 2007, the site quickly started to fall apart. The social features that made Upcoming unique were minimized, or removed entirely, by a series of redesigns. Spam, like creeping kudzu, was left unchecked and spread across the site. Fortunately, the final catastrophic redesign never made its way out of beta.

By 2009, the only people using Upcoming were event promoters and spammers. (Especially depressing considering self-promotion was banned entirely for its first two years.)

Frustratingly, nothing’s come to take its place. Potential competitors like Plancast and Going closed their doors, while others never grew an organic community. Some sites carved off a piece of Upcoming: Facebook’s private events, Songkick’s concerts, and Lanyrd’s fantastic conference coverage.

But, for me, finding events I care about feels like 2002 again. I’m missing geeky events I’d love, and when I travel to a new city, I’m back to digging through the calendar listings of my local weekly newspapers. It blows my mind that the problem Upcoming solved — surfacing interesting events in a city, driven by public social activity — is an unsolved problem again.

And now, Yahoo will quietly take Upcoming off life support, an opportunity squandered.

Bleeding Purple

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when Yahoo was actually pretty cool, in its own dorky Silicon Valley way.

By 2005, when we started talking to Yahoo, they’d made a series of thoughtful hires, including PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, Jeremy Zawodny, Tom Coates, Simon Willison, and future Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson. Cameron Marlow, Jeffery Bennett, and Mor Namaan were doing pioneering work at Yahoo Research. They acquired Flickr, bringing some of the most talented and creative people in technology to help change the company from the inside, including Cal Henderson, Heather Champ, and founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. A month after we came in, they acquired Del.icio.us.

Clueful people were making their way up to the executive level, too. Future Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond led the redesign of Yahoo Mail, future Topspin CEO Ian Rogers was managing Yahoo Music, and and Bradley Horowitz, now VP of Product at Google, was taking over big pieces of the company. Yahoo was an exciting place to be.

Upcoming was a side project, created during my day job at a financial company. After my son was born, I had no time to work on Upcoming at all, even as the community grew. Spammers started to discover the site, as bug reports and support requests piled up unanswered. The opportunity to work on my own project full-time was a dream come true.

And Yahoo seemed like a perfect home for Upcoming — they’d promised resources to grow the community, we’d get to work at a promising tech giant with some of our favorite people, and the acquisition price was small but seemed fair. Coming into Yahoo, we were hopeful.

It wasn’t clear how dysfunctional the rest of Yahoo was until we’d settled in, and there was no indication how horrible they’d soon become in the years to follow. This was long before they gave up dissidents to the Chinese government, closed Geocities, weaponized their patents, “sunsetted” Delicious, and a number of other awful decisions.

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition. (YouTube is the rare exception, albeit one with billion-dollar momentum.) But Yahoo was a particularly horrible steward for the community.

I built Upcoming because it scratched a personal itch, and I was delighted when so many others found it useful. For the small group of old-schoolers that remember it in its prime, Upcoming made their lives better. I’ve heard stories of people finding friends and spouses through Upcoming, people lonely in a new city tapping into new communities, impromptu parties gaining momentum.

I’m going to miss it.

Archiving Upcoming

Upcoming stopped being relevant long ago, and part of me is happy that Yahoo’s putting this bastardized version of the site out of its misery. (In case your memory’s foggy, compare how it looked when we left to its current state.)

What really upsets me is that the archived events will soon be taken offline, and with no way to back it up. Ten years of history will be gone in 11 days. Good URLs never die, and I’m frustrated that every link to Upcoming will soon 404.

I’ve reached out to Yahoo multiple times over the last few months about re-acquiring the Upcoming.org domain and event database, but they were less than receptive.

I would love to create a permanent archive of Upcoming, with a clean responsive layout and some month-by-month analysis and visualization of the site’s history, but getting the metadata’s proving much more difficult than I thought.

All of Upcoming’s events and venues use autoincremented ids, making it dead simple to generate a list of URLs to scrape. But Yahoo’s security makes scraping a challenge. Every time I’ve tried to back up pages, I can only grab a few files with curl or httrack before Yahoo starts serving blank responses.

Note that scraping the HTML alone won’t provide the full list of attendees for popular events, which are displayed via Javascript. For example, to get all the metadata for this event, you’d need to scrape both the event page for the event details and this XML for the attendees.

If you have any idea how to scrape Upcoming’s events, or can get me a dump in any form, please get in touch ASAP. Anonymity guaranteed.

Update: Archive Team is working to save Upcoming, and they need your help in the rescue efforts.

Comments

    I am so sorry for your loss. I feel like every one of our websites is a child we gave birth to, so seeing one dying would be particularly painful to me.

    Your story was so sad that I actually wrote a fictionalized version of it. I think I emailed you. It’s called Merriton. Here’s a link to the first entry.

    http://www.merriton.us/2007/05/23/that-thats-a-shed/

    I hope you feel better about Upcoming.org. I loved it as well and it was very helpful.

    Best,

    Laura Moncur

    Still missing Upcoming to this day. I agree that there is still a void when it comes to finding out about events. For my own city, I still have to subscribe to various newsletters. Songkick has been wonderful for events though.

    I wish you would have done a Mixergy interview with me about Upcoming.

    I think you built a site that taught many of us how adding social can make products better.

    And now it’s gone. And soon it’ll be forgotten, like it never existed.

    Please take the time to remember and document (in detail) how you came up with the idea and brought it to life. Even if it’s not in one of my interviews, your story needs to be saved so others can learn from it.

    Talk to Jason Scott and archiveteam.org; they recently coordinated a massively distributed effort to recover Posterous blogs before its shutdown (coincidentally, also scheduled for April 30th.)

    It may not be too late!

    [email protected]

    I’ve got experience writing a scraper that used open web proxies from hidemyass.com to get around the limits you describe. Even better is that I ran it on Heroku (aka: free servers).

    > After Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, and I left at the end of 2007, the site quickly started to fall apart.

    *wince*

    Although, I can’t disagree with the overall conclusion.

    Hey Andy,

    I have a large array of crawlers and IPs at my disposal. Just did a test on 10k events (both pages) that took 10 minutes. Could be further speeded up.

    Ping me if you’re interested!

    Hey, you’re right. The founder announced he was going to close it, but it looks like he ended up selling it to a company called Active Networks instead.

    You ever think about building an open source version that people could self host, ala WordPress?

    Andy, a sad announcement but, as you said, this particular demise has been inevitable for years. I also agree that it feels like 2002 again in event discovery. Eventful actually has some sort of business promoting movies via email; Zvents still exists with a large index of events but relatively little community; and another (3rd? 4th? 5th generation?) crop of startups is here trying to solve the core problem, and running into the same intractable issues of user engagement > monetization > useful scale / geography / diversity. Meanwhile a few new ticketing entities have emerged, including Eventbrite, Goldstar in the discount market, and Active for a host of participatory events; and the fragmentation and discovery problem remains unsolved, as does the problem of promotion for any event very far outside of the mainstream. I enthusiastically await the entrepreneurial masterstroke that will fix all this, but it may be a long time coming.

    Andy – upcoming was so wonderful when it was really firing 6-7 years ago. I can’t believe it has been that long. It would be great to read about how you guys got it going in its earliest days. How did you get get the community going to the point of critical mass, etc. I think it would be really helpful to the thousands of entrepreneurs struggling with the chicken/egg problem of starting a community-powered service today to learn from your early tactics and successes.

    I do miss the old Upcoming, it was the only event discovery engine that ever worked for me. As you point out, that is still an unsolved problem and not for lack of trying or need — when I taught my social media class, almost every semester I had at least one group of students deciding to build a system to help them find events.

    Needless to say, I also miss the Yahoo-circa-2005 environment, people, and energy.

    Source-appropriate nostalgia.

    Scrape it out of Google’s cache. You’ll need to be creative with NAT or another IP address as Google will rate limit you… But it’s all there… For now.. Good luck!

    Andy, thanks for a really cogent post. I joined Yahoo! in 2006, partly because the talent pool you’re describing from these acquisitions was so inspiring–and watched the company go sideways and downhill pretty quickly, paralyzed with indecision.

    I was an early upcoming user, and yes, it was superb back then.

    I set up many yahoo abuse filters up in the past and watched many people figure out ways around the ones I setup when I worked at yahoo. You should be able to scrap the site but you need to throttle your request rate to a level that does not get you blocked. If you do get blocked you just need to wait an hour or so before being unblocked automatically (your IP and other aspects of your requests go into a jail state until requests stop for a set duration). If you do decide to scrap the site keep this in mind, it might just work. Best of luck!

    I know of a few methods to successfully scrape Yahoo at scale. Drop me an email and I can share some tips.

    I feel your pain. At least Jaiku had an API without perf limits that we could use when google decided to shut down. On the other hand, they did not release the domain to us, so here is the story of how we solved the Jaikuarchive http://jardenberg.se/jaikuarchive/

    Hope you’ll find away, the web is never better than its links.

    (Btw, do you know of anyone still using the upcoming API?)

    Hey guys,

    Just to let you know, I’m coordinating with Andy to scrape the full site over the weekend. Will let you know here how it goes!

    I remember wanting to work at Yahoo because of all the great energy, and Upcoming, Delicious and Flickr, and talking to Kellan, Rabble and Chad about doing so. It faded pretty quickly.

    Archive Team has a tracker where you can ‘watch’ them back-up Upcoming live, currently up to almost 20GB: http://tracker.archiveteam.org/upcoming/

    They will also tell you how to join in!

    For the sake of completion I would urge everyone to join there instead of starting their own scraping. Better have everything go to a central place than to have bits spread out over several archives.

    Sigh. I remember using Upcoming to help manage signups for the 2006 Open Hack Day in Sunnyvale (also known by some as “the Beck Hack Day”):

    http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/101629/CA/Sunnyvale/Yahoo-Hack-Day/Yahoo/

    I remember making the decision to classify it under “Festivals” and not “Conferences.”

    Seven years later, it’s hard to articulate what an amazing collection of people were all in one place at the same time. Upcoming was a key part of the glue that held it all together. It’s sad to see it go.

    I’ve had a similar idea for many years now. I don’t have the skills to create it but it could be useful to integrate some form of the idea into what is done with Upcoming (if anything is done to salvage it).

    Event Horizon was taken I believe but I used it for my brain storming label when designing my flow charts on the white board. So, it would go something like this:

    Allow event organizers to not only post their event but manage their event from the site. Allow users to search by event type in say a zip code ‘great circle” affair.

    If I played disc golf, I would want to know of events in my area and would drive perhaps 75 miles to attend. This follows for bowling, quilting, and just about any sport or hobby what interest the public. On the back-end, managing an event means collecting money to reserve spots or chairs or whatever is unique to the event type. Monetization involves selling advertising around the given event types, delivery of SMS or Emails or RSS messages to interested parties as event happen or are about to happen and of course there would be charges to event planners that manage their events thru the system.

    I hope this sort of app gets developed.

    bob

    Sigh.

    It’s sad to look back and realize how deep the company’s problems ran when you looked beyond the bubble that a group of us was lucky to be part of for a few years.

    Andy, you’re right. This problem hasn’t been really solved. Or I should say, this problem is once again unsolved.

    bummer. well it’s cool to see so many people coming together here to help archive the site.

    In addition to running Y! maps, I was the product manager for Upcoming from 2010 to early 2011. I worked on re-imagining Upcoming (thus the beta site) with one really talented web developer/designer and a backend developer, but they were sadly doing this part-time.

    I did heard about you reaching out to Yahoo to re-acquire and thought it was the right thing to do. If Yahoo couldn’t give it the love and investment, it should divest and sell back to the founders (a la StumbleUpon). Local was in turmoil and there was not a strong exec in sight to make that call.

    In 2010, Yahoo was heavily investing into local and the events database was concerned valuable, so your request to re-acquire wasn’t considered.

    Andy, I hope that our paths will cross someday.

    Always sad to see a creative startup get eaten this way. Lesson? Don’t sell out to “the big guys”? This makes Yahoo sound little better than Google’s “spring cleaning” – eat and regurgitate. Or…buy, consume, die…

    The events industry is in deed in turmoil, struggling to deliver a solid events platform and I hope with mobile we can start to see the real ‘local event’ appearing in time and locally enough to attract a crowd.

    Upcoming has really been a bad experience all round with images and Flickr integration being a technical joke.

    Yahoo failing, Google events a bit of a joke and Big events powered by zvents – the big boys really don’t care so much about the events space.

    3000 event sites worldwide and growing and still looking for a market leader… We Wait.

    I’m very sorry to hear such a bad news! Regarding backuping the entire database, I might have the beginning of solution. Have a look at http://eventmedia.eurecom.fr/ … we have scrape almost the entire upcoming db + eventful + last.fm and interlink all resources in a single interface (powered by semantic web technologies). This has won the Semantic Web Challenge last year. Contact me if you wish to learn more and how could we help to restore the service.

    Raphaël

    Hi Andy,

    we develop an open event database and our philosophy is very close to the inital idea of Upcoming I guess. It is called cibul.net.

    It is Open Data, geolocalized and you can use our API to store your data and make it downloadable.

    http://developers.cibul.net

    I’m in touch with Raphaël who wrote the previous comment, let’s do something all together!

    ++

    Upcoming was such an important part of the Web 2.0 revolution, enabling us to find each other and connect, but more importantly, helping us each find the knowledge we needed to move forward and grow. I remember talking to you about the acquisition the week after it happened in House of Shields, looking forward to a bright future when the site would have the resources it needed to be all it could be. Very saddened to hear of what happened, and what is about to happen.

    But still very grateful for all you did then, and what you are trying to do now.

    So don’t take the money from Yahoo then.

    Build a long-term company the way it used to be.

    I am fed up reading this story – if you want an early (usually planned) exit strategy for an IT start-up then you lose all rights over the company no matter how badly managed by the new owner when you sell the majority shareholding.

    Short-term-ism is a bad economic strategy for any sector – sadly IT and web initiatives are full of such greed.

    If you still want to archive whatever you possibly can of Upcoming, I have a suggestion.

    Use Yahoo! Chat, and go into Computers’ Lobby:2 or Hackers Lounge:2 (or HL3). Ask if any “old regs” are around and if they can help with the meta-data scraping. If you get lucky one of the guys/girls that really, truly understands Yahoo security (probably better than Yahoo themselves!) will a) be around and b) be interested in helping out.

    Failing that, try Freenode #hl2 & ask for the same. Though last I heard that channel was password protected.

    Yahoo has a long, long history of making “adhoc changes” – specifically to the YCHT & YMSG protocols, involving a fair amount of web-based Captcha and user profiles. So these guys have likely solved your scrape problem already.

    Feel free to drop me an email if you want to know particular people within the Chat community to look out for (if they’re even still around!).

    I’ve commented about the inevitable death of upcoming for years now. I saw what Yahoo did to Delicious which was exactly the same thing. Acquire & expire, buy & die. It’s a horrible trend that yahoo, google, facebook and other big fish have been doing for years.

    I wrote about the demise of Delicious for Sarah Lacy when she worked for yahoo. She caught my latest ranting about yahoo’s grim reaper tactics and asked me to wrote about it for her blog entitled “Once Delicious, Now Stale”

    http://www.sarahlacy.com/sarahlacy/2008/04/once-delicious.html

    When they finally released an update that was long over due I was asked to do a review by Sarah.

    I called it “Delicious 2.0: Scrumptious or Sloppy Seconds?”

    http://www.sarahlacy.com/sarahlacy/2008/08/delicious-20-sc.html

    Anyway, the Youtube founders eventually bought delicious and tried to bring it back to life but the world has passed it by. I still use it because I’m a sucker for nostalgia and keep hoping they will find a way to make it better.

    Andy Baio reminds me of Dennis Crowley who experienced the same thing with Google when they acquired his beloved Dodgeball and killed it. Instead of just whining about it Dennis launched FourSquare which was a bigger and better Dodgeball and the rest is history. Andy you should do the same thing. The events space still needs a better solution. Plancast is nice but it still needs many features. Upcoming should have become EventBright…not only sharing events and plans but also managing them. You can do so much more with a new socially savvy upcoming built from scratch today for the mobile age. Give me a call and I’ll be glad to help out. I have some great ideas for one. 🙂

    Paisano

    Sad to hear about this news, sounds like the community is jumping in a bit to help archive the site.

    I remember the Yahoo of 2005 you describe, though from the outside. It seemed like an exciting group of people and innovators. I’ve never heard a good reason why Yahoo was never able to capitalize on all those great people and startups. Why did it start sliding downhill after 2005? Any old insiders want to share some clues on what happened?

    Best,

    Brad

    Hi Andy, nice (and sad) to see your mention of Going, which I co-founded. My cofounders and I always had a spot in our heart for Upcoming and indeed its closing will be an unfortunate day. I did my own backup of Going but alas you can’t back up a community… but I wish you best of luck saving what can be saved of Upcoming.

    Cheerio,

    Roy

    As of the time of this post:

    — Upcoming tracker —

    Done: 406254

    Out to work on: 8633

    To Do: 37857

    “So don’t take the money from Yahoo then.”

    Let us know when your time-travel startup goes into public beta.

    In the meantime, Andy’s been at the forefront of creating alternatives to acquisition.

    From a historical perspective, Upcoming was important because of its technical generosity: it’s easy to forget the novelty of using feeds and an open API ten years ago, rather than creating data silos. Archiving it means that the data’s preserved to tell its story; what’s perhaps more important is building on its ethos.

    very sad to hear about the shut down of Upcoming and also the way/timing of it.

    especially because it has been for my brother and me one of the most appreciated and valuable ispiration during the development of our little project http://www.wikido.com (for now limited to US with about 1-1.5M events each month).

    On upcoming we have founded probably the best approach for the events data modeling.

    Our project is now in a very early stage and hearing what can happen to a very consistent project after a decade doesn’t sound very good for us.

    So we’ll read several times all your considerations and we’ll take care of them. Thanks for this post.

    And if you (or others) would like to give us some suggestions or feedback on our project it will be very appreciated.

    Giuseppe

    This is so sad. What would Yahoo! have to lose by letting you take this over? Seems to me that they would gain good will and lose nothing. Please keep asking. Someone over there must be able to help. If you have not yet tried, send a personal email to the new CEO. The bad press they are getting from this is not good for them. Just makes it look like Yahoo! is circling the drain.

    Scott.

    I think it’s clear in hindsight that YouTube had been planned this way from the start. It’s probably not coincidence that YouTube and Google were funded by the same VCs. YouTube was gaining quick marketshare, while losing money and facing legal trouble. Google had internet legal expertise, money and networks, but wasn’t having any luck with their own video sharing service. Sequoia probably wanted this acquisition all along.

    Le Sigh. I loved UpComing and all your work Andy. It was a great bunch of people at Yahoo then and so much promise.

    Perhaps the next downturn will create a similar crap of great fresh stuff.

    I feel for you, but they bought it and it’s their right.

    I’ve sold a couple of companies myself and in both cases, it’s been a painful thing to watch what was precious and hard-fought squandered by some idiot or some young product manager. But I got paid for my pain.

    But whatever. I just hope you got enough cash to make it worthwhile.

    No one made you sell, and no one made you sell to Yahoo. *You* are to blame, not yahoo.

    Sure, it would have be nice that they didn’t mismanage it into oblivion, but didn’t you think that could happen?

    If the work was more important than getting paid, then you should not have sold it in the first place.

    Don’t come back now and complain that you got paid, but didn’t like how it worked out. That’s bush league.

    Create another startup with your own cash, hold it privately, and run it however you see fit.

    Thanks, Internet, for always being there to state and restate the obvious. I thought I was pretty clear when I wrote, “In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate.”

    I take full responsibility for selling Upcoming, and I also have every right to complain about the way they mismanaged it and handled its closure. They’re spectacularly bad at that, and should be shamed.

    When I make mistakes, I like to write about them so that other people can learn from them. Inevitably, that invites criticism from anonymous people around the world. So be it.

    Awwww, I’m so sorry to see you guys go. You were hands down the easiest of all the event sites to post to. I even wrote you several times to say so. As publicist for a major cities summer events, it was always a pleasure to know how easy your site was to use when I was posting over 50 events per season.

    I’m going to miss you guys and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

    Thanks for all your good work!

    Awwww, I’m so sorry to see you guys go. You were hands down the easiest of all the event sites to post to. I even wrote you several times to say so. As publicist for a major cities summer events, it was always a pleasure to know how easy your site was to use when I was posting over 50 events per season.

    I’m going to miss you guys and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

    Thanks for all your good work!

    Hey everyone,

    We’ve been looking into developing a community powered event listings site that focuses on just music events for a few months now. Seems like such a huge gap that needs filling.

    @Jeff – Thanks for sharing the link to the VanCitySounds.com site. I live in Richmond just outside of Vancouver. I’m quite surprised that I haven’t heard anything about it before today. You seem to have really complete event listings and filter out the small local bar gigs and weekly club nights that typically clutter these types of calendars. About how much percentage of these events are getting sent in from the Van community? Seems like getting visitors to post shows would be the

    Hey everyone,

    We’ve been looking into developing a community powered event listings site that focuses on purely music events for a few months now. Seems like such a huge gap that desperately needs filling.

    @Jeff – Thanks for sharing the link to your VanCitySounds.com site. I live in Richmond just outside of Vancouver. I’m quite surprised that I haven’t heard anything about it before today. Looks clean, and you really seem to have the complete event listings and filter out the small local bar gigs and weekly club nights that typically clutter these types of calendars. About how much percentage of these events are getting sent in from the Van community if you don’t mind me asking? Seems like getting visitors to post shows would be the difficult task? (other than perhaps, monetization)

    I’ve been scouring the internet for ages trying to find a community calendar that fits the bill. Other than songkick, I’ve come up short. Any plans to roll this thing out to some more cities?

    Tony

    Hi Andy and anyone else reading this,

    This story is a true shame, no doubt, thank you for sharing! I work on the team currently developing UpTo (http://upto.com), a social calendar tool being developed in Detroit. We aim to stand on the shoulders of giants, learning from the successes and failures of those that came before us (Upcoming, Plancast, etc.) in order to bring social event sharing to the masses!

    Thank you for paving the way for companies like us,

    Jacob

    Hey,

    Just wanted to say that I was an avid user of Upcoming.com.

    It made it super easy to find good music shows and concerts in the Greater Boston Area. It worked great in the beginning, and I loved it! Found out about a lot of great stuff through your site. Just wanted to say thank you for your creation, and I am sorry for what happened to it through out the years. it was super helpful, and it was extremely disappointing that Yahoo seemingly murdered it over the past years.

    thanks again!

    John

    I loved upcoming, but was less convinced it would make it when it was bought by yahoo. It’s a shame because it seems like it was a big problem to solve that didn’t have enough infrastructure in place and Yahoo could have helped with that. There was also too much spam. Yahoo could have helped with that too. Upcoming is one of those ideas that if just had critical mass, it would serve a serious pain point. Maybe it just needed to combine with FourSquare, which has a limited utility IMO. For upcoming, defining venues was always non-nonsensical and it needed to better map spaces to events. Seems pretty obvious to leverage mobile users like that. Alas, I’m without a way to find grass roots events, and relegated to newspapers, marketers, and ticketmaster. Yuk.

    I was wondering what happened to this website. I’m sorry to hear of its demise.

    I do hope that something rises from its ashes though. There really does need to be a tool for checking upcoming events.

    The problematic part about the original though was that the filter for paring down the plethora of events wasn’t good (or maybe it’s b/c I wasn’t using it correctly, that’s more the likelihood). I’d usually end up with like 75 listings and then have to go page by page through all of them.

    Doing a search by location would either give me too few results (San Jose, yawn), or the too many (SF in all its minutiae).

    I was wondering what happened to it!

    its very sad to see all the best events sites disappearing

    upcoming gave me much hope that there were others with out there also interested in federated/syndicated/shared events data and making things easier for people organising events and for people looking for events.

    Upcoming was one of the few out there willing to push the envelope.

    perhaps those of us who still run or have an interest in events sites should get together and create a decentralised, federated network that could survive beyond individual sites and doesn’t need to rely on external funding to survive.

    perhaps something *could* “rise from the ashes”?

    (and in a sense the “ashes” of my own site too – and lots of others – all wondering what to do about not being able to find much interesting to go to ourselves)

    ok this thread is a year old .. and maybe nobody will read this.

    I just hope everyone has not given up on events!

    Hello Andy,

    I loved Upcoming and was very sorry to discover it was gone. I run a little company that specializes in helping choirs get their concerts listed, and one of the first places I always put them was on UpComing.

    I hope you can realize the dream of Upcoming 2.0 – bigger, better, and independent!

    Bruce

    It seems every independent good platform gets bought by the Establishment owned conglomerates and then is made ineffective. I’ve seen it happen way too many times to think it is simple incompetence. Anything that connects people free and easy will eventually be bought and destroyed just as any independent news source will see the same fate. The solution seems to be dedication from the beginning to never selling out – aka craigslist and wikipedia.

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