Review: Eventful

Overview Eventful promises to:

Find local events, see what's on at your favorite venues, and know which performers are coming soon. Track what your friends are interested in doing and share your favorites with them.

Eventful is, uh, full of events. Yay! Even in my little town of 10,000, folks were using the app and the full-featured website to list organizational events, performances, and request appearances by speakers and music artists.

Functionality

Eventful is very straightforward and well-designed graphically. There was never a question in my mind about what I was trying to do. There are menu bars at the top and the bottom of the screen. The top menu allows you to view by events, venues, or performers. The bottom menu has the following buttons:

• Profile - Allows you to set your own preferences, location, etc.
• Track - Allows you to save events, venues or performers.
• Featured - Gives you a list of events that are noteworthy.
• Search - Pretty self-explanatory.
• Demand - A nice feature that I would like to apply to the rest of my life... Imagine going to the store for an item and it being out stock. You could just hit the "Demand" button, and folks would jump at your beck and call to make it happen.This feature allows you to interact with other locals to give input on who you'd like to see come to your town. A list from my area revealed Kelly Clarkson, the Jonas Brothers, and Mike Huckabee as well as others. In another nice feature, you can see a list that shows the most demanded events.

Review

Eventful is great app for seeing what is happ'nin locally. It's especially useful for larger towns that have all kinds of events going on regularly that you may miss on the news or local websites. If you're out of town with family or friends, it would be especially helpful to avoid the "What do you want to do?... I don't know, what do you want to do?" conversation. At the first question, you could fire up Eventful and say, "Well, there are about 8 interesting things going on this weekend. Let's pick..." MG Siegler over at VentureBeat also pointed out a feature in his review that I didn't like either. While the app has the option of allowing you to purchase tickets for an event, it takes you from the app to Safari. I too wish you could stay within the app to do that. By the way, Siegler has a nice write-up of the app which also includes an interview with Brian Dear, Eventful's founder. It's a great piece. One thing graphically I didn't like was the monstrous Dallas Cowboy-ish stars that appeared next to venues and events that hadn't uploaded an image. I'd just prefer text there. It was pretty loud.

Summary

I was pleasantly surprised by Eventful and immediately began to see its usefulness for social and organizational use. Now if only everyone in my area would get clued in. It would be nice to have schools, churches, businesses and entertainment outlets in one area all using the service. Then our local area might truly be eventful.

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