Hey, I'm Patrick - founder and dev of etrigg.com, a fast growing, lean and pretty cool event discovery start-up. It helps people to find events nearby pretty quick on any device w/ a browser (NO downloads, NO tons of ads, NO search, NO BS). Feel free to try it out and post feedback, thx :)
Thanks! There's a little bit of adsense at the moment (trying to keep it "non-intrusive"; covering infrastructure costs) but for long-term it's planned to have event promoters on board paying for "promoting" or bulk importing their happenings (e.g. seminar providers, trade fairs etc.)...
looks nice! The only thing I noticed is that when I use geolocation there isnt a way to set a radius I am interested in - so I am seeing everything only in my suburb but not my metro area.
Thanks, yes there's a feature to set the radius but that's by registration only at the moment. Just needs email + PW (ya, sry for that but it's safe!) and then you can also subscribe to searches/locations/events or post events on your own (pretty simple).
Feature suggestion (or feature creep):
I think as one other poster mentioned, for people that are in a suburban setting, it might be a neat idea to concatenate search locations: my university, my local city, a local town that i am willing to drive to, and my current position could all be contributors to one "list of interest".
Looks good, but it would be nice to be able to select a date range (i.e. be able to search an upcoming weekend) and it doesn't currently seem to be able to go past the current page?
Also, the location selection could be a bit more intuitive, I'd maybe make the location name in 'See what's happening in _____' a link to change your location. But overall pretty good, I'll be taking a look at it in the next few weeks :)
I hope its not too much to ask for apple-touch-icon for the site, as it looks like a great useful site that will be on my iPhone's home screen. Thank you
Good job! Love the simplicity. Current state of event discovery is rubbish and so fragmented across sites and categories of event. Just had a look at my home city (Edinburgh) and there's way more happening than I would guessed by browsing sites like Time Out, Resident Advisor etc.
Would be cool to show Meetups too, but that might pollute the space a bit too much in large cities.
Usually on the site should appear all the meetup events from meetup.com - but could be that you have more meetups in your area than even meetup provides ;)
It's also possible to register on our site and add own events - pretty fast and easy BTW.
Thanks! And thx for noting the issue w/ the iphon icon - hope to fix that soon (thought it being already working :/ )...
...but screenshots might be nice too :D
The data primarily comes from several (bigger) platforms providing APIs like FB, Eventbrite, meetup.com, some artsy ones, TVmaze, and now event the LH API for flight data and OpenWeatherMap for weather data - yes you can even see "forecast events" of your local weather in about 5000 of the largest cities worldwide.
Last but not least there's a few hundred of small event providers that signed up themselves and post all different kinds of events.
Cool. I am surprised to see events in my not so densely populated area. Where are you getting them from currently? Also, is there some way to see them further out than just today/tomorrow?
I've seen tons of such websites, but they all have the same problem -- lack of content. How are you going to add/discover up-to-date events in tens/hundreds/thousands of cities? It's not feasible doing by hand, and organizers/users are not going to add events to every such website out there. I really hope you have some ingenious solution to this problem, because now, sadly, the best place to look for events is Facebook (that's the only reason I still have an account there).
It seems like it's using some Facebook-api to populate itself. So countries that use facebook can actually find quite a lot of events here. I certainly noticed some interesting ones from my town.
However, I tried searching from Shizuoka, Japan, and ended up with 2 events in total. So it has to rely a lot on Facebook.
I don't understand why you're so down on yourself in the title? Yet another? What other ones are there? It's not like it's a saturated market. Like the options in my city (Nottingham) is pretty sparse. Leftlion event listings (poorly curated, filled with boring 'club' events and gallery shows that are listed every single day because they last months), experience nottinghamshire (seems broken) and skiddle (crap).
Be proud to get something done and out there! And finished!
I've always thought the big problem in these things is curation, like for me I'm just getting a random dump of stuff near by. Are you scraping this from facebook or something as the events seem ok, but I could see you getting overwhelmed by crap.
I think it needs a lot of love UX wise, look at this event for example:
At a glance, where the hell is it being hosted? Why did you put that at the bottom not the top? Why put a start and end time with dates? Why is there a category called 'Universal' in the page, if it's a catch all, don't display it.
The site is also almost entirely devoid of colour, it looks like a github page or something, not something fun to do with fun events.
Technically it seems good, but I think you need a lot more thought and prettying in the UX.
Event discovery is a well known startup trope. Try pitching anything around event discovery to an investor, you will see their eyes roll. Is that fair? Probably not. I think what OP is doing is fantastic, and I second your encouraging words.
Yep, I expected to see nothing for Phnom Penh, Cambodia, but there were actually quite a few useful results. It's a least comparable to the one hand-curated events site for Phnom Penh that I know of.
I did have some odd UX issues with the filter button. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was responding to my input, and once or twice it reset the options I selected back to what they were previously. But, keep going OP!
Really impressive. I thought of something like that some years ago, but aggregating events all around the world seemed a daunting task. Never went further as scrapping the site of a local free cultural agenda. Good luck!
Cool, thanks. Ah yes, the startpage is pretty dynamic as it mostly relies on the users position.
But hey, that might be an interesting idea: to be able to "share searches/discoveries", which is basically sharing the settings used at the moment, with others. Hmm... ;)
Impressive, and seems to solve the problem of "hat weird portal am I using today to see if anything is up around here". Still looks a little like a beta, but does all I want. Someone else mentioned shareable URLs would be nice, and I second this.
What is your method of adding events? Scraping Facebook events? Other random websites that show events, like virtualnights.com or so?
Edit: I see several dublicates for my city today (Bielefeld, Germany). I started checking since I saw that venues I like had two concerts today, and I thought, huh, they only have one stage, and saw it was the same, but labelled differently (Artist vs Tour name or so). So probably scraped from two websites that called it differently? Maybe this could be improved by comparing the venue and checking for similarity in the event name ("Iron Maiden - live" and "Iron Maiden on tour" might be the same event).
Saved this. I am looking at the DC listings, and I was immediately impressed that it had a lot of cool things that you wouldn't expect to find on a generic list. Nice work.
Also, what in my opinion is way worse than Orgies.... meat market nights, like over 30's events and so on, just offering nothing but commercial crap. So a way of filtering spam events would be good.
What is the date-range this is using? I am only seeing events for the next few days. Is it possible to expand into the future so I can make future plans?
Interesting aside, it detects my location as "University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA", I'm on the University of Utah campus at the moment in the library so it's interesting location API's are that granular with the data.
It seems pretty cool though, I think it would be nice if events showed their price, but I imagine that's not here because it's not in the data getting scraped.
I like it. clean, simple useable interface. One issue I had: I couldn't tell if I was toggling something "on" or "off" in the top bar. Maybe it's just me, or the way my browser renders (FF).
Excellent work. I've seen a lot of event sites and this one is the most concise and efficient. Seems to pull a lot of events! Would be nice if you could facebook integrate your friends events too.
I think you're getting the HN hug right now. Submitted a registration form never got the e-mail. I can't click any of the categories (like business for example). Changing the radius would be nice. Metric vs imperial for the 'muricans.
OK, thanks to all your comments so far - I'm a bit overwhelmed by the feedback to this kind of "no-brainer idea" (love it) and I wanted to answer them all one by one but this site doesn't let me as it yells "commenting too fast" at me all the time :P
SO I'M GOING TO WRAP UP ALL PREVIOUS COMMENTS W/ THE FOLLOWING ANSWERS, HOPE IT WORKS:
0. SOLUTION: The one and only Idea behind that was "I want a list of events, NOW - nothing else". I even didn't what to "search" events - I just want them in a list regarding where I am now and what's up next. Period.
I too think all others fail at this and it sucks especially when being drunk, travelling or not always using FB to search for events (which sucks, too, I think) and so on. Of course the site is extremely limited and consider it still as a protoype (in version 2 now), but I love it having so as I don't need to spend much time on it to see what's goin'. I built the site primarily for myself and use it almost every day. It works well, here in Zurich, as I'm always on the hunt for interesting people or happenings (tech and non-tech). And it comes ultra-handy when travelling to other cities or countries.
1. MARKET: Now, it seems like there's A HUGE DEMAND on fast, lean, lovely and NO BS event discovery sites as the market still doesn't provide anything properly. So I got the impression I'm at least kind of on the right track in solving this issue and hope to be able to improve the site as much as I can to fit that need - would be awesome.
2. CONTENT: Most events come from other sites like FB, Eventbrite, meetup etc. via their APIs (funny, but none are scraped!). I implemented dozens of these APIs within the last 2 years and they mostly seem to work fine. The goal was to have a huge diversity and as much content providers on board possible. Actually due to legal restriction (copyright crap - on event info, LOL) this is only a fraction of what I wanted to have implemented, but we'll see ;)
There's also tons of individuals who sign up and post their own events (of any kind), which is cool and also subject to huge growth in the not so distant future.
Think how cool it would be having postings about happy hours for bars and restaurants etc. - like they mostly do only/mostly on twitter at the moment. These events are mostly too small for Eventbrite & co. as well as most FB stuff but have 'em here could lead to a whole new use case, for example...
3. CONTENT CATEGORIES: These are a bit different than on all the other platforms. The intention with this site was to provide ALL KINDS of events, so also stuff like e.g. transportation (flight plans, train scheudules), public (authority) events like "when comes the garbage man" or public holidays, tv schedules (mostly US + UK at the moment) - that's the "media" category or "business" as in trade fairs, weather etc...
So categories are here less what the event is about as more of what kind it is - e.g. there might be a congress about climate issuees what makes in mostly an educational, community or business event but not a weather event as the happening is not of kind "weather".
4. UX: Yes, it's lean, simple and fast. As some of you mentioned maybe a little too simple or not "loved" enough ;) That's currently the 2nd iteration + I'm not a great designer and I like things ultra-simple. I think I spent more time deleting code and appearances than the opposite (ok "physically" impossible but it felt like that). Might get better, I hope B-)
Also, most stuff is build around the browser view of e.g. an iPhone 4 - so 320 x 480px. I wanted everything being still good to use on all those smaller displays and that's what's the site mostly is built around.
5. EVENT DISCOVERY: Yes, there is an option to see far future events. But it's currently only when signed in with an registered account (needs only email +...
I started something like that [1], making the scrappers for each websites started to get a little bit crazy and turned the meetup.com scrapper into his own project [2]
My final plan was to make this available as an configurable .ics so you can use Google Calendar. But with a big city the density of noise gets really big and it should also try to only recommends events that you may like and can go to...
81 comments
[ 10.4 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadFeature suggestion (or feature creep): I think as one other poster mentioned, for people that are in a suburban setting, it might be a neat idea to concatenate search locations: my university, my local city, a local town that i am willing to drive to, and my current position could all be contributors to one "list of interest".
Also love the simple UI. Very Craigslisty. No noise.
Also, the location selection could be a bit more intuitive, I'd maybe make the location name in 'See what's happening in _____' a link to change your location. But overall pretty good, I'll be taking a look at it in the next few weeks :)
Would be cool to show Meetups too, but that might pollute the space a bit too much in large cities.
Bookmarked!
It's also possible to register on our site and add own events - pretty fast and easy BTW.
Btw, you should look into adding a custom icon when bookmarking on an iphone. At the moment it just shows a screenshot of the page.
The data primarily comes from several (bigger) platforms providing APIs like FB, Eventbrite, meetup.com, some artsy ones, TVmaze, and now event the LH API for flight data and OpenWeatherMap for weather data - yes you can even see "forecast events" of your local weather in about 5000 of the largest cities worldwide.
Last but not least there's a few hundred of small event providers that signed up themselves and post all different kinds of events.
However, I tried searching from Shizuoka, Japan, and ended up with 2 events in total. So it has to rely a lot on Facebook.
Thanks.
Be proud to get something done and out there! And finished!
I've always thought the big problem in these things is curation, like for me I'm just getting a random dump of stuff near by. Are you scraping this from facebook or something as the events seem ok, but I could see you getting overwhelmed by crap.
I think it needs a lot of love UX wise, look at this event for example:
https://etrigg.com/event/an-invitation-to-discuss-travels-tr...
At a glance, where the hell is it being hosted? Why did you put that at the bottom not the top? Why put a start and end time with dates? Why is there a category called 'Universal' in the page, if it's a catch all, don't display it.
The site is also almost entirely devoid of colour, it looks like a github page or something, not something fun to do with fun events.
Technically it seems good, but I think you need a lot more thought and prettying in the UX.
I did have some odd UX issues with the filter button. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was responding to my input, and once or twice it reset the options I selected back to what they were previously. But, keep going OP!
- I enter to the website and I have to change the location and press "see events", this is ok.
- The page refresh and I get the events in my city, but the url is still https://etrigg.com Would be nicer if the url would have changed to https://etrigg.com/upcoming/berlin/ so I can share it.
I had to go to the footer to see how links to cities are made.
But hey, that might be an interesting idea: to be able to "share searches/discoveries", which is basically sharing the settings used at the moment, with others. Hmm... ;)
What is your method of adding events? Scraping Facebook events? Other random websites that show events, like virtualnights.com or so?
Edit: I see several dublicates for my city today (Bielefeld, Germany). I started checking since I saw that venues I like had two concerts today, and I thought, huh, they only have one stage, and saw it was the same, but labelled differently (Artist vs Tour name or so). So probably scraped from two websites that called it differently? Maybe this could be improved by comparing the venue and checking for similarity in the event name ("Iron Maiden - live" and "Iron Maiden on tour" might be the same event).
https://twitter.com/etriggNews
Sounds like he will reply when he can.
It seems pretty cool though, I think it would be nice if events showed their price, but I imagine that's not here because it's not in the data getting scraped.
Any type of rss feed available?
I think you're getting the HN hug right now. Submitted a registration form never got the e-mail. I can't click any of the categories (like business for example). Changing the radius would be nice. Metric vs imperial for the 'muricans.
SO I'M GOING TO WRAP UP ALL PREVIOUS COMMENTS W/ THE FOLLOWING ANSWERS, HOPE IT WORKS:
0. SOLUTION: The one and only Idea behind that was "I want a list of events, NOW - nothing else". I even didn't what to "search" events - I just want them in a list regarding where I am now and what's up next. Period.
I too think all others fail at this and it sucks especially when being drunk, travelling or not always using FB to search for events (which sucks, too, I think) and so on. Of course the site is extremely limited and consider it still as a protoype (in version 2 now), but I love it having so as I don't need to spend much time on it to see what's goin'. I built the site primarily for myself and use it almost every day. It works well, here in Zurich, as I'm always on the hunt for interesting people or happenings (tech and non-tech). And it comes ultra-handy when travelling to other cities or countries.
1. MARKET: Now, it seems like there's A HUGE DEMAND on fast, lean, lovely and NO BS event discovery sites as the market still doesn't provide anything properly. So I got the impression I'm at least kind of on the right track in solving this issue and hope to be able to improve the site as much as I can to fit that need - would be awesome.
2. CONTENT: Most events come from other sites like FB, Eventbrite, meetup etc. via their APIs (funny, but none are scraped!). I implemented dozens of these APIs within the last 2 years and they mostly seem to work fine. The goal was to have a huge diversity and as much content providers on board possible. Actually due to legal restriction (copyright crap - on event info, LOL) this is only a fraction of what I wanted to have implemented, but we'll see ;)
There's also tons of individuals who sign up and post their own events (of any kind), which is cool and also subject to huge growth in the not so distant future.
Think how cool it would be having postings about happy hours for bars and restaurants etc. - like they mostly do only/mostly on twitter at the moment. These events are mostly too small for Eventbrite & co. as well as most FB stuff but have 'em here could lead to a whole new use case, for example...
3. CONTENT CATEGORIES: These are a bit different than on all the other platforms. The intention with this site was to provide ALL KINDS of events, so also stuff like e.g. transportation (flight plans, train scheudules), public (authority) events like "when comes the garbage man" or public holidays, tv schedules (mostly US + UK at the moment) - that's the "media" category or "business" as in trade fairs, weather etc...
So categories are here less what the event is about as more of what kind it is - e.g. there might be a congress about climate issuees what makes in mostly an educational, community or business event but not a weather event as the happening is not of kind "weather".
4. UX: Yes, it's lean, simple and fast. As some of you mentioned maybe a little too simple or not "loved" enough ;) That's currently the 2nd iteration + I'm not a great designer and I like things ultra-simple. I think I spent more time deleting code and appearances than the opposite (ok "physically" impossible but it felt like that). Might get better, I hope B-)
Also, most stuff is build around the browser view of e.g. an iPhone 4 - so 320 x 480px. I wanted everything being still good to use on all those smaller displays and that's what's the site mostly is built around.
5. EVENT DISCOVERY: Yes, there is an option to see far future events. But it's currently only when signed in with an registered account (needs only email +...
My final plan was to make this available as an configurable .ics so you can use Google Calendar. But with a big city the density of noise gets really big and it should also try to only recommends events that you may like and can go to...
[1]: https://github.com/mdamien/events
[2]: https://github.com/mdamien/scrapy-meetups