BostInnovation Article: RiotVine, Boston’s Realtime Social Event Guide

What’s the best way to find events happening in Boston? Craigslist, Boston.com, or CitySearch? What about Last.fm? Maybe you simply cross your fingers and update your IM or Facebook status to read, “Whats going on this weekend?” hoping for a response from your friends?

While Facebook and Twitter are efficient ways to share events, using either to find new ones can be a bit more challenging.

This is the premise behind RiotVine, a new Cambridge-based start-up attempting to make it easier to find local events and spend time with your friends.

RiotVine is a city-based event listing site integrated with social media services; it combines the efficiency of Twitter with the personal networks we maintain on Facebook.

RiotVine’s Founder, Kabir Hemrajani, highlighted a number of reasons Facebook Events aren’t conducive to event organizers, and subsequently, offer little help for people looking for local events. Kabir explained how the event invite process is tedious, requiring organizers to add invitees one at a time. Combined with changes to the policy on regional networks, and lack of support for embedded videos on event pages, services like RiotVine might be helpful for both event promoters and fans alike.

“Facebook Events were really designed to help people manage birthday parties,” Kabir summarized, noting that the strict process doesn’t provide the tools to promote events.

Kabir thinks the most important data people look for when planning what show or event to attend is whether any of their friends are planning to go, and who’s talking about going. For that reason, RiotVine event pages list who’s attending, display local activity on Twitter, provide maps, and include “add to calendar” tools. The number of tweets below each event is a handy way to measure the interest level.

For event promoters, creating an event listing is free on RiotVine, which just added new pages for Austin, Tex., and San Francisco, Cal., TODAY. Other supported cities currently include Boston, Mass., New York, NY., and Los Angeles, Cal. You can also quickly find events tagged “national,” like Coachella.

Kabir, a Northeastern University alum, sees Boston as a great testing ground for RiotVine considering the area’s diverse mix of both technology events and live music venues. At the moment, RiotVine Boston is dominated by music, (from The Roots , to Anti-Flag) which may change once RiotVine’s newtagging/classification system is rolled out. This is a feature Kabir mentioned is under development.

RiotVine will have to compete with thousands of event listing sites ranging from Yelp, Eventbrite , Going.com, and Eventful. Local mainstays like The Phoenix, and Boston.com’s Events Calendar have solid followings, as well. (The latter reaches over 189K monthly visitors.) The key to RiotVine’s success lies in building some distinct features over these more established sites.

A difficult task, especially given that many similar sites host content rather than embedding or linking to it. For example, internet radio and music community sites like Last.fm and Pandora have a huge advantage here, as they already have users visiting to tune in; incorporating event listings is simply an added bonus.

Even though Pandora seems to be crushing Last.fm in monthly visitors , they still haven’t implemented any local event features. In fact, Pandora hasn’t seen very much of anything in terms of new features, and keeping the site 100% Flash-based constrains them terribly.

Last.fm, on the other hand, offers a personalized events listing feature based your listening history. Even if you haven’t created an account you can view all Boston events or drill down into genres such as electronic music in Boston.

Kabir is banking on the assumption that RiotVine will be more personal, focusing on your “real life” friends, rather than the often anonymous aliases used by most of the Last.fm community. RiotVine members can use their actual Facebook or Twitter accounts, rather than starting from scratch, in order to participate.

What do you think, does Boston’s real-time social event guide have a chance in this landscape? What factors do you consider when contemplating a local event? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.