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.

Last month, I spoke at Creative Mornings/Portland about copyright, fair use, and remix culture. It started as a riff on my No Copyright Intended post, and ended up something much bigger. I really like how it came out, I hope you do too.

Watch it full-screen HD on YouTube.

Pizza Hut To Hold 140-Second Interviews For Social Media Manager Position at SXSW

Meet Nyan Cat’s Creator at Mashable House

Tweets Will Power Doritos’ 62-Foot SXSW Vending Machine Concert Stage

Top the Kred SXSW 2013 Leaderboard and Become a Kred Star

Klout Offers ‘Cirque du Soleil’ VIP Perk at SXSW

Quiznos to Present at OMMA Mobile at SXSW on Mobile Advertising Campaign Success Powered by Sense Networks!

…and more.

The line to try Mailbox, the new iPhone app for managing your inbox, is long. Really, really long.

I signed up the day it went live in the App Store, on February 7, and finally made it to the front of the line this morning after two weeks of patient line-waiting.

While I was waiting, I’d occasionally open the app to see my place in the queue, and think — what if the line was real?

Imagine an ever-growing line of weary people fiddling with their phones, sprawling off into the distance. How long would the line be?

If you signed up right now, you’d find yourself at the end of a line with 807,896 people ahead of you.

They’re letting people in at a near-constant rate of 800 per hour, or just over 13 people per minute.

Let’s assume that people standing in line take up an average of two feet of space, from back to back with room for personal space.

The line stretches over 300 miles into the distance. To put it in perspective, that’s further than London to the outskirts of Paris. It’s 30 miles longer than Hollywood to Las Vegas. It spans from the Bronx to Portland, Maine.

But it’s moving! Slowly. At about 0.3 miles per hour. You’re shuffling along at just over five inches per second.

At the current rate, you’ll make it to the front of the line in about 42 days.

I hope you brought a charger.

After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.

As I wrote last month, Macklemore is only the second unsigned artist in Billboard history to reach the #1 slot, the first in two decades.

And now, with a new #1, another record’s broken: Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” is the first song from a largely unknown artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Since 1958, only 21 songs have ever debuted at #1. Of those 21 songs, only four were from artists appearing on the Hot 100 for the first time, all from artists with extensive mainstream media exposure — three American Idol contestants (Clay Aiken, Fantasia and Carrie Underwood) and a popular artist going solo (Lauryn Hill). Source: Billboard.

I’d wager this is another first: “Harlem Shake” is the only song to ever debut at #1 on the Hot 100 without significant radio or TV airplay. This is solely an Internet phenomenon, gone deeply mainstream.

This is in no small part because of major changes incorporating YouTube views into the Billboard Hot 100 formula, introduced this week in response to the viral success of “Gangnam Style.”

This week, a report surfaced that Nielsen will start tracking YouTube and other digital plays too.

Billboard and Nielsen are just acknowledging a long-overdue reality. Radio and cable aren’t the future, and if you’re focused on tracking them, you’re looking at an ever-shrinking window of behavior.

But seriously, who cares what Billboard and Nielsen think anyway? Aren’t the charts irrelevant? For most purposes, probably.

But like winning an award, chart success is a symbol of reputation. Recognition from a reputable source tracking sales or viewership opens doors for artists, especially important if you’re independent.

It’s one thing for Amanda Palmer to raise a million dollars from Kickstarter, but having her album debut in the Billboard top ten shows that there’s demand beyond her most hardcore early supporters. This gives her team the power to negotiate everything from distributors to concert venue contracts.

And when other artists see that indie artists can find legitimate mainstream success on their own, others will follow. This is already happening on a small scale, but it’s only going to get accelerate.

A couple weeks ago, I went to see Ben Folds Five’s reunion tour here in Portland:

Just saw an unsigned indie trio from North Carolina that crowdfunded their new album. These boys are going places! twitter.com/waxpancake/sta…

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) February 6, 2013

I joked about it on Twitter, but I’m not sure many knew I was serious. The reformed Ben Folds Five is unsigned.

After releasing their first three albums on Sony, Ben Folds Five decided to fund their album on Pledge Music and release it independently.

They easily could’ve released it through a label — Ben Folds is still signed to Sony/Epic for his solo work and Darren Jesse through Bar/None. Why do it all on their own?

Because they could.