Comments on: Facebook: It’s Time to Enhance Events

By: Via Page

Via Page — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:48:03 +0000

I too would like the possibility of posting an ongoing event. And actually I have seen some events posted that are ongoing and designated so, but there is nothing obvious in the options for creating an event that alows for this. help! I love using facebook to keep track of events of interest. I wouldn’t want to add them to my calendar – unless I am really sure I want to go. So keeping them on my facebook is good for me.

By: D. Lambert

D. Lambert — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:36:09 +0000

I’ll have to try to find the iCal link. I have a feeling that most people don’t find that to be as much of a killer feature as I do, but there’s just no way I’d keep track of where I’m supposed to be if I couldn’t pull several calendars together. I understand that MotoBlur (Cliq) is supposed to do something like this, too, isn’t it? (Maybe this is an Android 2.0 thing).

The people-pages-events relationship thought is interesting, too. Probably stems from a people-centric view of the world in much the same way that CRM systems model contacts-accounts-opportunities. It would help integration if a common taxonomy evolved, but I’m not sure who’s going to lead that push, since it risks making each of those “walled gardens” that much more of a commodity.
D. Lambert´s last blog ..Fixed bid isn’t nirvanna

By: Andrea Hill

Andrea Hill — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:02:57 +0000

I believe events can be exported right now via iCal, but there is much more that could be done. Integration is certainly key!

I do think that Facebook is starting to get away from the ‘walled garden’ approach in terms of having information available elsewhere both feeding into and coming from the site. Doing that with Events would bring them to a whole new level, IMO.

The other thing I started to think about (and then stopped because it was getting to be too much) was how they see the relationship between people, pages and events. A page can’t exist without being tied to a person, but an event apparently can be tied to a page or a person. There is some weird dependency there that I’m not sure is as clear as it could be.

Thanks for the comment!

By: D. Lambert

D. Lambert — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:27:37 +0000

Good stuff, Andrea. In order for Facebook (or any other site) to be useful for scheduling events, though, the real key for me is integration. I want events to be available in iCal format (see the TechLife Columbus events calendar). Merely making that feed available makes it lots more likely that I’ll pay attention to the events, because I can see which ones don’t fall on a night when I’m running my son to swim practice or band, or whatever, because the calendar integrates with all my other calendars.

While we’re on that subject, accepting an event invitation should add an event to the calendar of my choice – the TechLife calendar almost gets it right, but the Google Calendar integration doesn’t seem to work with Google-hosted domains.

I know that Facebook would rather have me keep coming back to Facebook to see what’s going on, but that’s just not as helpful for me as standards-based data availability.
D. Lambert´s last blog ..Fixed bid isn’t nirvanna