A late meeting I had last night ended early and I was at loose ends downtown, so I ended up swinging by the Third Tuesday event, since Rob Lewis' post at the TechVibes blog reminded me that there were a couple of events going on mid week.
Tonight (Wednesday) is the nPost Entrepreneur Meetup*. I'm not too sure about nPost. I mean, it's great to have more people highlight and promote tech in Vancouver, but there is such a thing as too many different events and focus at some point... The focus for nPost seems to be startups, and highlighting the people and companies in cities where they have events. Rob and the gang at TechVibes are sponsoring, so I'm sure they'll do a good job of guiding them into the Vancouver scene. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, I've got the Granville Island Night Photowalk to attend.
Back to discussing the Third Tuesday event...this was a sort of "kick off" event, so there was no speaker or discussion, just mingling at the Soho Cafe in Yaletown. I think there were as many as 30 people through out the course of the evening. I ended up mind melding with Rob Lewis as we talked about the rebirth of TechVibes.com and tech / events in Vancouver in general. Soon the martini-wielding Jenn Lowther** from Invoke Media and Mike***, a Comp Sci / Cognitive Science student from UBC, joined us bad kids by the bar.
One of the things that we discussed is "where to post events?". Third Tuesday itself is the perfect example for this. Rob posted about it on the TechVibes blog, and linked to the listing he created on TechVibes.com. That, in turn, linked to the Meetup.com page. On the Meetup page, we find that a CollectiveX group has been created. I created an Upcoming entry for Third Tuesday, but I actually originally found out about it through the Facebook group.
Yeah. That *is* ridiculous in case you were wondering. I won't go through this time and analyze the usefulness of each of those listings, but as two data points, I believe Mike and Jenn both found out about the event through Meetup.com. Oh, and why did I create an Upcoming.org entry? Because there is a widget for Facebook, so posting to Upcoming automatically gets it into Facebook. I just did the same thing for the Granville Island Night Photowalk -- the upcoming entry can be a public Internet URL, but it shows up inside the walled garden of Facebook as well.
The ideal event listing platform would allow you to do two things:
For bonus points, aggregate back all the media that gets created to your permalinked event entry. Merging attendee listings might be fun to try and tackle, but approaching impossible until we get closer to the whole portable social network concept.
In any case, thanks to the organizers of Third Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a more structured 2nd event with a speaker. Just let me know where to look for event announcements :P
Notes:
*to the nPost guys: you don't even have a permalink for this particular event, just the #vancouver anchor tag: Rob's TechVibes listing gives you a permalink, but you really need to have direct permalinks / separate pages for all your events
** Jenn, ya gotta get a real site that's "you" online. I'm tempted to become number one for your name :P
*** sorry, Mike, I forgot your URL. Leave a comment or email me and I'll update it.