Let’s find some interesting parties - Review of Social Events services

Written by Luyi Chen on August 27, 2006
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It is weekend today and sunny outside in Shanghai. You probably like me, don’t want to waste your life in dark room. Let’s go out and attend parties. How do you find interesting events around your place? Are you still going though BBS or sending short messages to your buddies. That’s so 2005. In this post, we will review some Chinese social events service. That’s where geeks find interesting parties.

If you still don’t know what social events service means, that’s the place where users comes to share interesting events and find more from others. These services track events by time and locations, which are easy ways to navigate to the one exactly you want. Further, these website can generate a personalized calendar for you, so you won’t miss any interesting event anymore.

The first social events service we reviewed is 8sheng. In Chinese, it sounds like the word HAPPEN. Take a look at their tagline and you know what it means. Their tagline is Tracking all past, happening and upcoming events. 8sheng also sounds like peanut in Chinese. That’s the default profile picture of new registered users.

8sheng has a portal style homepage. Features are quite complete as a social events service. You can browse all events by its popularity, cities and places. And you can join group with similar interests and find more relevant events. In the right column of homepage, there’s a context menu, where you will easily find tasks related to the page you are browsing. The popular events page is in a Digg style. When you click on the link of one event, it’s popularity will increase by one. Maybe there’re other ways to affect the popularity too. The team has a blog here.

Next, let’s go to Mosh. Oh no, it looks ugly in Firefox. This makes the service less attractive to us in the first place. But after further investigation, it came out to be the most impressing one. The name Mosh means Moment Sharing. The core feature is called Jingxiang in Chinese. It means users are competing with each other to share their events. Why? Because the more interesting your event, the more attendees you get. Events in this section are all organized by the one submitted them. There’s also a feature called yellowpage, where you can share whatever interesting events you know about.

Different from other social events application, Mosh is user centered. The feature to lock users in is called Moshow. That’s a bit like MSN Space. You got a space URL like http://space.mosh.cn/yourname/. Users can share things like pictures, blogs and their interests on their space page. This makes it easy to find people with similar interests and the social aspect of the service more solid. Other feature that makes it outstanding is the mobile feature. Users can get notice of the new events or communicate with other users by SMS. This feature is even more important than RSS in Chinese social community because of high mobile penetration in China. The developer’s blog is here.

The last one we want to evaluate is Woyaofaya, an interesting Chinese name. I didn’t find an explanation of the title on the website. Does that means events submitted are like seeds, which are going to grow up (get more attention and attendees) in the application. The homepage is quite simple compared to the above two. There’re two big columns. One for latest events and the other for hottest ones. There’s a hot image column on the right top of the homepage. Events with excellent image get more visits. The search input is separated with event name, time, location and people, which are basic characters of an event.

When you click on a specific place, you will see a list of events happening in this place. In this service, it also includes place review. The interface is quite similar with other popular restaurant review website Dianping. A note to Dianping: Open API for other applications, so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Summary

Yet another social events service that we don’t include in this review is Boubo. Basic features are provided. Take a look if you are interested.

Although we compared features in these services, but what matters is the community. We can bare with incomplete features, but cannot stay with a service without high quality community. Good architecture or hot programming language doesn’t bring users directly. Testers are not real users. Actually all services we reviewed are lack of serious users except Mosh.

One important but missing feature in all these services is RSS or Calendar syndication format export. Service like Upcoming.org is RSS enabled everywhere. Whether you want to get updates about new events or comments on one specific one, you can find RSS for that purpose.

About the author

Luyi Chen is a PhD student from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He recently joined China Web2.0 Review as a new contributing writer, focused on reviewing and profiling new services. You can read more about the author on his personal blog, http://www.chenluyi.com or email him directly to luyi@chenluyi.com

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One Response to “Let’s find some interesting parties - Review of Social Events services”

  1. 发生网 on August 28th, 2006 9:52 pm

    Thanks for commenting our site, http://www.8sheng.com .
    We’re busy adding some new features, which will be released soon.
    We’ll info you once they go public.

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