A few weeks ago I covered the new cohort of social activities sites. In the subcategory of basic events listing services, notably comprising Upcoming.org, Zvents, and Eventful, I neglected to include BusyTonight. Ironically, I missed it despite the presence of an active blog on which developers write thoughtfully about the philosophy and execution of the service. BusyTonight is a subsidiary of privately held Team Gigabyte and based in NYC. The CEO is Joshua C Lerner, COO is Richard Mintz and CTO is Matt Kangas.

BusyTonight differentiates itself from the other services by targeting the big mass of less popular events would go otherwise unlisted, the Long Tail. Everyone will list a Madonna concert and likely some or all will miss a lacrosse team fundraiser at the local community college. That’s because they all subscribe to the same duopoly of commercial sources, EventSource and EventCrazy, which naturally capture economically incentivized events, and rely on the imperfect methods of pulling calendars, eg Google Calendar, and RSS feeds and gathering user contributions for the remainder of events. These methods are imperfect – imcomplete and slow - because they require a mass of individual effort. Some of the “loose” events may be captured this way, but the majority will sit unreplicated in their home web pages.

BusyTonight breaks from the prevailing regime by spidering the open web – hitting those sources directly – and extracting the event information. This way events that fall through the cracks of Upcoming.org et al have a chance of being captured, centralized and found by the independent person who wants do things not sanctified by the herd. Users query the mechanically generated events database by keyword with options for location and dates. Leaving the keywords blank returns a dump of results.

What’s the value? I was tempted to proclaim that few normal people have a regular diet for unpopular events but then I decided to look carefully at the BusyTonight listings. One event that jumped out at me was a free talk on skin cancer at a local hospital. It’s not listed on upcoming.org, zevents or eventful or in the dominant local city paper Washington CityPaper’s events database. But it’s right there on a page on the hospital’s website and captured by the crawler. A talk on skin cancer is not something I’d willfully look for, but if I had gotten a bad burn at the beach this summer and the timing and logistics were convenient, I’d considering dropping in for the talk. That event might well turn out unpopular to the metro DC audience because no one bothered propagating it to major events databases, but certainly not because it lacks value. It has value to the right person; she just has to find out about it. The hospital pushed to its own audience while implicitly welcoming all comers. BusyTonight breaks that marketing provincialism - or laziness - by pulling from the open silo and presenting to anybody looking through their index. I tried a handful of realistic and reasonable Google searches and did not turn up this event. It's the aggregation of many such quality "loose" events that's the draw.

The minus of algorithmic trawling are noise listings that are not really events or categorized in the wrong region. One example of the latter is a DC listing for a trade conference actually taking place in China. The originating organization is based in DC, hence the algorithmic confusion. Another example — tantalizing because it shows the power of open trawling – yet disappointing for it illustrates the flaws of machine sorting is an election night party hosted by University of California Alumni. The event was hosted in DC but listed for San Francisco because that’s where the Berkeley Alumni event web page “is”. This is a good example of cool local social event - and of one placed in an open silo - that would go unlisted. These are minor flaws - a few bad apples in a huge bushel of good ones - the developers know about these issues and will remedy them through their incremental improvements.

One nice superficial feature they added in the last day or two are thumbnails of the website next to each listing. One serious feature they have planned is to allow users to edit the events data. Getting users to contribute whole listings to a database is much harder and a different proposition from getting users to edit a large body of existing data. It’s like stumbling upon a popular and well data populated wiki with an entry dear to your personal interests. You might make an edit. Here the seeded data is all machine compiled.

I don’t know the long term business model but BusyTonight seems busy for the moment building up the database – over 500,000 listings as of November 9th – and getting appreciated later. Of course, it’s not the cumulative database that matters but the rate of growth, which measures the expansion of coverage into more open silos. From July to early Nov 9th 2006, their events database doubled. Compare that to the measly growth in user contributed events on the other systems. The total listings for DC in Upcoming and BusyTonight are not far apart, in the 12-14,000 range. Of course, the overlap might be just a fraction and the two sets thus largely represent different events. It will be interesting to see the relative statistics in a few months. Aside from mundane technical issues like scalability, the big issues for growth are finding new domains to index after the low hanging fruit of edu's, churches, hospitals, etc have been tapped out and increasing the quality of the listings, eg geo-sorting them properly and filtering out non-events.

With the emphasis on the Long Tail, BusyTonight isn’t a one stop event shopping source, at least not yet. It should be seen as a complement to upcoming.org or your local city paper; those sites do popular events really well. This is truly a blue ocean strategy because no one else is machine trawling for events. If they don't stay independent, I see them as a good acquistion for a major search engine looking to laterally expand their feature set. It would also make a good acquisition for somebody looking for seed their calendar system. Obviously Google could benefit in one swoop in both these areas. A buyout would be in line with all of the little fill-in acquisitions Google has done in the past. Worse case, they go B2B and sell their listings.