Spectral Web Services
Why are all the events only on social media??
And do you really want to let them be responsible for getting the word out?
Why am I so interested in hyperlocal events calendars lately? It probably has something to do with Haunts.
One of the interesting things on building automated calendars is that some communities have a high number of event producers whose only means of distribution seems to be social media. No calendar on the website. "Follow us on ___" is how they want their audience to learn if they're putting something on.
Does this work? I mean, if your whole audience is on that platform, and the platform reliably shows your events to your whole audience, then I guess so.
As soon as that's not true, things break down. Fast.
[I'm especially perplexed by a few places that seem to post their events on Instagram. As images. How does that even work?]
As I'm collecting events from all the local sources I can find, to build automated Haunts calendars for local newsrooms, I keep running into the only-on-social, and specifically, the only-on-Facebook problem. Putting event information into Facebook is a one way workflow. The information goes in, but it doesn't come back out.
Facebook does not provide a useable API for getting events out in any sort of generic way that doesn't involve having administrative access to the site hosting the event. Yes, there's a page that will show all the events in a region, but there's no bot access. All the secrets of these public events are Facebook's alone.
Sorry, am I ranting? Yeah, ok, I was ranting.
There are companies out there that sell Facebook events data, which they're pretty clearly scraping. Some specifically sell runs on residential IPs, because even if your request looks human-shaped, it had better not be coming from a data center IP address, or Facebook will block it. It's cheap enough to use one of these to grab a handful of events once. It's just not economical to use one of these services to scan all the events in all the regions with Haunts calendars every night.
I compare Haunts calendars to some of the big calendar providers pretty regularly. (The ones with an extra 0 at the end of the monthly price, specifically. That doesn't narrow it down much, does it?) They do have social media events. It's super clear that those events originate on Facebook, and in fact, they link back to it. I suspect these companies are scraping, or they've got a separate deal with FB for events data that isn't available through the regular API.
I could buy scraper services, but this is a big added cost for a platform that's really not trying to do much more than cover costs. I have "social media events" listed on the top Haunts tier, but I'm not sure I can actually afford to provide them even if all of the price bump goes to buying social data.
I could build a scraper. If it gets my residential IP blocked by Meta and the teens in my household lose their social media access, I'm not sure that's actually bad thing. 🤷♀️
Could Haunts be the source of truth?
I looked at whether I could set up Haunts to be the source of truth, which would push your events to FB and offer a readable, usable format for sites publishing calendars. The short answer was nope. Facebook does have a page about how to apply to integrate with them, which allows posting events via their API. I was briefly excited, until I read the note on that page says that applications are paused due to COVID-19. Everything I can find says that they've got a small handful of big company partners, and that's it. No small developer route.
TL;DR: Putting data into Facebook is for humans and big companies only, and so is getting it back out.
What I wish event organizers would do
If you want your events on Facebook, great. It makes sense to put events in front of your audience, and maybe you don't care that Meta controls what your audience sees and you're totally at their mercy.
But, if you are posting events on Facebook, please don't only post them there. You're shutting out that local newsroom that would really like to share information about your events but can't without hours of human labor every week. Social media should not be the only "source of truth" for your events. Please, please, please put them somewhere else, too.
One option to consider might be listing events on EventBrite as the primary "source of truth". EventBrite has the ability to create Facebook events, and Haunts can ingest data from EventBrite without issues. Last year, I'd have 100% told you to do that. This year, I'm eye-ing that Bending Spoons acquisition, and not sure I want to tell anyone to add EventBrite to their stack, out of fear that next year's offering may be markedly worse than this year's. [See what happened with Harvest as an example.]
So, please. A Google calendar? A plugin that manages events on your website? An RSS or ICS feed that your website might already support? Literally anything except Facebook-only? Please?
/rant over. Back to building.
