But I think what Steve’s after (I might be wrong) is something that the musician can use in a tweet that refers to a specific event (eg. the Eventful page) and is easily searchable in the usual Twitter search context (ie. hashtags).

The RSS feeds, email alerts and the rest already exist. I’ve signed up to plenty over the years and they tend to be annoying, impersonal and not useful. If Steve mentions a gig on Twitter I’m interested, but mostly because of the rest of the Twitter message.

I don’t think we need anything more than a message (prob. including a date and city) and a URL for the people who are already following the artist. It’s the search that’s difficult.

Twitter works best when people hand craft the messages. Automatically added hashtags are nowhere near as useful. To take care of the search, why not just use #gig and a location hashtag, which you can make as specific or broad as you think is appropriate? I would probably use #oxford for an Oxford gig, but definitely #soho (or, more likely, ‘#london #soho’) for a Soho gig. Doesn’t that work?

The benefit of having something like a Twitter gig search engine would be the visibility of the system. If musicians knew there was a standard way of getting their gigs into the search, they would use it. But it wouldn’t have to do anything more than search Twitter for ‘#gig #wherever’.

Interesting thoughts, though…

I like how Mail.app can recognise events in an e-mail, the algorithm is actually relatively simple – a regular expression to match possible times (7pm, 1900, 7 o’clock), a regular expression to match dates (absolute and relative – e.g. “Thursday, September 24″ vs “Next Thursday”, vs “the 24th”) and then treat everything after “at” as the location. Postcodes (full or partial) are easily spotted, especially if they’re in a chunk that we know is the location. You could then assume everything else that isn’t explicity matched above as the line up and/or description. Either way, I think it’d be safe to assume it’ll be meaningful out of context.

I’ve been working on something very similar (no date/time, but parsing tweets for a name, location and a rating), and so far it’s proved reasonably straightforward.

Natural language processing is far more intuitive to write and to read (as the name implies). The parsing is more complex than a neat “standard” for a hashtag, but it lowers the barriers to entry for users who aren’t au-fait with what their twitter client can do, and don’t fancy trying to decipher a hashtag.

This gets really interesting if you can use the data you parse from a tweet to query Eventful/Last.fm’s APIs [do last.fm have an events api?] based on date, location and a fulltext search based what you have left – shouldn’t be enough to get a match that you can assume with reasonably certainty is the same event.

1p.

Ben

Twitter is fairly nastily unsemantic for things like this. I get meeting people where they are at but Twitter is pretty hard from a machine parseable point of view and I’m not sure the merit on intentionally limiting gig information to <=140 characters.

Or perhaps Twitter is a red herring and RSS feeds and custom stream merging tools (like Yahoo! Pipes) are a better solution? Can tweetdeck add headlines from an RSS feed? Does it even need to, given that there is still plenty of value in having a feed reader as well as watching the tweets go by?

I would want a Tweetdeck column (like Steve says, eg. #LDNgigs). I would also want to be able to scan the column (by eye, not with a scanner) and see at least band name, venue and date. I know venue isn’t essential, but if I’m scanning Oxford gig listings, the venue gives me a huge amount of contextual info about the size of gig, type of band, type of audience, etc.

Although latitude, postcode, etc. might make for some interesting mashups, I don’t think they add to the listing. And if the link goes to Upcoming or Eventful (or similar), it would be easy enough for a mashup script to follow that link and pull the gig data (geo, description, tags, etc.) from the API of those services.

In an ideal world (making this up as I go along now, and a little hungover so bear with me), you could use the Eventful ID… Scratch that. I just looked at Eventful and they already have a unique Twitter hashtag for each event (beginning ‘#EV…’). So Steve’s Round Midnight gig (http://is.gd/3kMLW) is #EVsteve1007. If Tweetdeck automatically parsed that as an Eventful link we’d be away. You could add any contextual hashtags (like #ldn) that you like.

But… neither Twitter search (including, I assume, the API) or Google search allows character wildcards, (like ‘#EV*’) in their seraches, so at the moment it’s not easy to pull out all the eventful tags. There’s probably a way around that. Maybe just use the #gig tag too, and use the #EV tag instead of a link?

Interesting thoughts. Thanks for allowing me to dust off the cobwebs of a cider hangover on that.

Hmm, I see your point about meeting people where they are at.
Perhaps something combining several existing hashtags? Can Tweetdeck search on, say, #London #Gig? That might mean you get people from different groups in too, people who are looking for something to do in London or people looking for a gig regardless of location.

The interesting but hard problem with Twitter is the 140 chars limit combined with tagging (where you usually want to apply as many tags as possible to describe the data). Often the intersection of tags is more interesting/useful in my experience than the use of a single one, but obviously you’ve just given yourself less of a message

I guess the idea of the hashtag is that people can follow it, check the post code, then the date, then the link… heirarchy of relevance, stick it in a search column in Tweetdeck, check it when you want to see something but aren’t sure what…

There are definitely other services that do this stuff v. well, but it’s all about taking info to people where they are, rather than expecting them to all sign up to Upcoming or last.fm notifications or whatever…. or maybe it’s not. I’m open to being persuaded/dissuaded.

How are you doing, anyway, Mike? Good to hear from you!

I think there are perhaps other services (or the scope for new services) that provide this rather than trying to do it all over twitter, as, as is pointed out, the messages will either be annoying or not adequately searchable.

Even #LDNgig might not be precise enough for a lot of people, I’m not willing to travel to Croydon for a gig but would have been to e.g. Darbucka