Defining a Hyper-Local Events Platform
We’re gearing up, collecting data, and styling our pages, launch is coming soon! One of our first, and most important, decisions was “what would Hapnin.com be?” Should we create a destination site like Yelp or a platform like outside.in? How does this choice affect our service, our partners and the events community at large? After a lot of thought, we choose to create a platform because we believe this is the best option for everyone.
To build our platform, we needed to aggrate and normalize events data, or create an events feed. Feeds are taking over the Internet, from Twitter, to blogs, to Yelp and Facebook, they’re everywhere. For streams of information, they just make sense because people can digest lot of data easily.
Feeds for events are slightly different than the usual ones. Event feeds are chronological, they move from what’s happening now, to what’s happening in the future. A reverse chronological feed for events wouldn’t do you any good, you’d only see past events. Coovents illustrates what an event feed could be; list the current events, then upcoming ones.
Aggregated events data is amazingly useful, it can answer the question “what’s there to do around me now?” We know others will benefit from this data, we are building an open feed to share our data. Any website can take our feed (or a subset of it) and list hyper-local events on their page through our micro site plugin and our (soon to be released) API.
You can think of Coovents as one “view” of the Hapnin feed (happy hours in New York.) Which feed will you use?
In addition to sharing our data, we want to strengthen our community, from event goers to bloggers and location owners. Organizing our data in a useful format was crucial We’re confident we did this well, event goers will be able to easily find events. Bloggers will benefit from our great content and some features we’ve built in to our service. First, bloggers will keep their traffic, as event goers click around, they will stay on the blogger’s page, which increases pageviews. Also, social features (sharing on Facebook/Twitter/calendar/email) come standard, this attracts new event goers to blogs. Between our data and our partners, we’ll be able to spread the hyper-local events far and wide. Ultimately, this will result in more people going to the events. Local business will be able to fill their venues (cheaply) and talent (musicians/artists/ect.) will attract bigger fan bases.
The essence of a hyper-local service is its community, nothing is possible without it. We’re excited to provide a platform to strengthen our community for all involved.
For more information on our private beta, please sign up here or leave your email address in the comments below.
Greg
