Planning a Saturday night is hard work in a big city. Millions of things to do. But more often than not, when I'm visiting friends in London we spend hours browsing Time Out only to end up in the local pub because the gig we wanted to see was too far away, too expensive, on too early, not the right kind of music, sold out, etc.

We need a what's on guide for people who are too lazy/pathetic to choose a venue on their own.

I suggest a website featuring personal user pages and location/event pages. To start off, it would only cover music, but could later be expanded to include theatre, film, museums, and so on.

Event organisers submit their listing like on any other listings website.

But now the idea is to apply the concept of matching websites such as okcupid and stumbleupon to a what's on guide.

New users simply state their favourite bands and venues. More loyal users are encouraged to keep a diary of gigs they've seen, along with reviews and recommendations. A simple statistical algorithm matches users with similar tastes on a percentage basis.

When a user logs on, the website suggests a number of events, ranked according to how well the event matches the user's taste (based on similar users' behaviour), proximity and price. S/he can also browse personal pages of users similar to them to find recommendations.
-- kinemojo, Nov 16 2005

Yahoo Events Browser http://api.local.yahoo.com/eb/demo/
This might be what you are looking for. (Still in Beta) Click on the city name to change location. [trekbody, Nov 16 2005]

No, you need to get better friends.
-- DrCurry, Nov 16 2005


That's the whole point of the idea. A what's on guide for (the majority of) people who don't have better friends :-)
-- kinemojo, Nov 16 2005


I don't see why you couldn't have some sort of amazon-style recommendations system on the Time Out website (an excellent publication). Presumably it would record where you live, but also keep track of what events you looked at and it could throw up suggestions based on these two criteria. I don't think there's anything about it which says it's for dummies or lazy people.

Also don't see why it should only cover music, since all the other information is already available.
-- moomintroll, Nov 16 2005


Now that would be a good idea, but I would be amazed if there aren't already sites that do that. Still isn't going to help kinemojo until s/he ditches those loser friends, though.

[Later] Can't find any web sites like that myself, so go ahead and start one! You could probably use the Google engine to drive it.
-- DrCurry, Nov 16 2005



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