OK, here’s the deal. I’m a total fomo. That’s right, I have an irrational Fear Of Missing Out. Living in cities like New York, London and Buenos Aires, I am spoiled by choice of cultural, musical and artistical (it’s not a word, I know, but I like it) events, but for fomos like me, it can also cause extreme anxiety of missing the good goings-on around town.
Thank Valium there is Eventster–the web and mobile app that helps you discover events near you–from nightlife to concerts to festivals. They’ve recently updated the app with semantic technologies that will take keywords associated with an event to integrate into postings from social media—what co-founder Luke Stangel calls “ambient social.”
This begs the question…
What exactly is ambient social?
To start, it was all the rage at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival in Austin. Essentially, it’s technology that is helping you make connections in the (gasp) real world with mobile-device users in your surrounding area by tracking your commonalities with them. Apps that are utilizing this new concept include:
- Highlight– Anyone near you with this app will show up on your phone including their photos and profile and things you have in common. A pretty excellent icebreaker, no?
- Uberlife– Let’s you create or join social groups near you. Think after work drinks, by yourself, and gathering some buddies to join. No one wants to be that guy.
Now that we’ve been schooled on the new ambient social trend, how exactly is our buddy Eventster going to use it?
That band sucks, DON’T waste your time!
Eventster is a crowd-sourced resource of popular events near you, that means if people are buzzing about an event, you’ll know about it; if they’re dissing it, you’ll be warned.
It features over 600,000 live events ranging from sporting events, to local craft fairs—those events that are most voted on by other users will automatically be saved to the app and you’ll get to see, in real-time, what’s hot and what’s not.
According to Luke, Eventster’s “ambient social” update (found here for iOS) was not the easiest to code, in fact, he called it a “significant technical challenge” especially when it came to figuring out the relevance of keywords and hastags to actual local events for users. It’s not perfect, of course, but the bugs are being fixed, user issues are being solved, and popular events are being attended.
The site calls it the “Flixster or Pandora for events” that will make you “slightly more interesting and forever entertained.”
Now, that sounds like sweet social music to my fomo ears.
