Although, we all love to complain about the weather in Vancouver (just take a look outside) I would say the next most compained about non-political (READ: homelessness, Vancouver 2010 and the meth epidemic) topic is the lack of eventfulness, entertainment and “fun” the city offers. To the naysayers out there, I think the city is filled with cool events to attend and I do, mainly because I have the right online tools to help me. And now, local startup events-related sites, like UQ Events, Urbantastic and Rilli are making it possible for anyone to do the same. Their connecting you and your social circle online to events around town. I’ll cover Rilli later this week, but for now here is a quick comparison of the other two sites.
Urbantastic is for those who are interested in non profit, volunteerism and community based events and joining groups of that nature. It's a destination site where you can easily find and connect with non-profits that need volunteers. It uses a Facebookesque feed to show and gather the lastest twitter posts, blog posts or any news that an organization posts online. A user can click the feed and read more about the organization, the article etc., and then decide if they want to join the group or leave a comment. I think once more features are added it’ll be a nice addition the local non-profit scene.
UQ Events is a mainstream entertainment site that uses calendars, a sleek tag based search, sorting by popularity of events and dates that anyone can search. Once you set up a profile page, you can save your events to your calendar and view it as a whole and you can also post an event. Each venue or event also has their own calendar, friends and profile, so connecting is really easy. The site is useful if you know the city, venue and you have an idea what you’re looking to do.
I'd like to see more mobile features for both sites and possibly a "recommendations" area (almost like Facebook's Friend Finder feature) that will suggest events for you to check out based on your saved tags or most searched events.
We are creating an alternative economy of non-paid labour. While this encompasses existing volunteer and pro-bono work, we are also bringing a... [more]
UQ Events is a web-based social-networking service that allows people to post, find and share events and event information. [more]
Rilli is a map-based online and mobile event creation tool for social people, doing real things, in the real world. [more]
Thanks for these listings, http://urbanmixer.com/ also good for events!
Hey Victoria,
Great article. We're looking into providing our users with a 'recommendations' style events section. It's always good to hear that features we're working on are features that our users would enjoy.
Cheers,
Michelle.
