BusyTonight – The Long Tail of Event Listings
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.











