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Show HN: Things to Do API (thingstodoapi.com)

2 points by invalidmonk ↗ HN
I built an api/mcp for local events: pop-ups, one-off events, concerts, etc. currently covering the SF bay area.

I've been building a bunch of consumer apps lately around personalization and recommendation and have had a hard time finding this data in one spot. agents can find useful stuff through tool calls / web search, but slow.

you can scrape on demand too, but i wanted a faster data set and couldn't find an existing provider for the mix of event types I was searching for.

the methodology for it is to find influential accounts/posters/etc. and do a fan out across things that they co-post with.

mcp: `claude mcp add --transport http thingstodo https://api.thingstodoapi.com/mcp`

I'm considering adding other cities. If you're building something that needs local event data, would something like this be useful and where would you want coverage?

33 comments

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lap248
super slick! got results quickly and am getting more interesting and in the know kind of events than other tools
invalidmonk
tysm! are there any geos you would like to see?
egonschiele
This feels hard to maintain and keep up-to-date, but I would definitely use it! Great idea.
invalidmonk
If an agent maintains it, is it hard? :D
TheSamFischer
If it’s so easy, then please ask it to make the globe stop glitching out and flashing on scroll.
fellowniusmonk
Solving this issue a core problem for humanity, and it goes hand in hand with the need for a public service.

I'm actually working to do this at ultra low cost as a public service like Wikipedia or musicbrainz.

I'll be publishing global costs to serve and letting people donate to support.

shrinks99
This is pretty cool, does it scrape Instagram? A lot of events where I live (Toronto) are posted there and not many other places.
invalidmonk
amongst a few other data sources :) is this something you'd use if we added toronto support?
shrinks99
Personally, I don't have a project that requires it right now, but aspirationally maybe! I agree with another commenter that mentioned this is basically a public service that should exist similar to Wikidata / Musicbrainz.

I know this is currently a paid service you're trying to make happen and the scraping part is a reasonable amount of effort, but if you wanted to make the data source public, you could publish community.lexicon.calendar.event ATProto records and it would be very cool. At the very least, you could ingest it as a data source!

tokioyoyo
Which sources does it support? Discoverability is a huge problem for smaller events, as most get posted on IG, and it’s hard to even find them through IG.

I started relying on a mix of Muse/ChatGPT/Gemini depended on which data sources I want to combine, as they all seem to have special deals with different sources.

avree
It seems to use a (probably AI generated) list of common event sites, Instagram, and a few hardcoded ones related to the region (like Makeout Room). There's no de-dupe so you'll see tons of the same event copied across Eventbrite/Tixr/etc.
invalidmonk
there is indeed a dedupe implemented! if there are specific bugs with it, please send them my way :)
xyst
I don’t want to be that guy, but why do I need a middleman for something llm do out of the box?

Forget the API. Even search engines have returned these results for years.

I can potentially see an angle with SLMs integrating with a self hosted version of this API, but it’s a bit niche.

invalidmonk
Fine to be that guy! Let’s say you want to build a product that recommends concerts to people based on their music listening history. Do you want to pay for an expensive tool call and several second response time to surface answers back to the user? Yes of course you can build this yourself because SaaS is dead! Or someone else could maintain it for you :)
1shooner
>why do I need a middleman for something llm do out of the box?

Why use a token-burning middleman when someone has already done it for you?

sugabush
Heya I’m building something and nearly ended up building this on the side bc we need it. Great job. Would love to battle test it for you here.
invalidmonk
That would be awesome - what geos do you need? Currently only have SF bay but easy for us to spin up other locales!