Upcoming.org

» see upcoming.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard of upcoming.org was years late, sometime around the 2013 shutdown coverage. by october 2003 when andy baio launched it i was 19, studying computer engineering in ankara, on msn plus donanimhaber forums. event-discovery in turkey at that age happened through hi5 invites or word of mouth and not through a structured events database. upcoming was a us-and-uk thing, a small community of bloggers and conference-goers swapping links to meetups and gigs. it did not have a turkish presence in 2005 and not really one ever.

andy baio launched upcoming in october 2003 alongside leonard lin and gordon luk. the model was simple, you posted an event with a date and a location, your friends could mark themselves as watching or attending. follow graph on top, so the events your friends were going to filtered up in your feed. this was 2003, before facebook events and before meetup had any real scale. the structural pattern was the same one delicious had drawn for bookmarks the same year, social verbs on top of a structured object.

yahoo bought upcoming in october 2005 for around $2 million as part of the brad garlinghouse yahoo era's small-acquisition push. baio joined yahoo with his cofounders and ran upcoming.yahoo.com inside the local group in sunnyvale. baio left at the end of his two-year earn-out in late 2007. once he was gone the product entered the standard yahoo slow-fade pattern, no new features, no roadmap, no engineering staff dedicated to it.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

upcoming had a particular cultural location, the early-2000s blogger plus conference-going crowd in the us and the uk. the kind of person who went to sxsw in 2004 was on upcoming. by 2006 it had grown to several million events archived, the most useful feature was the page per event with watchers and attendees plus past comments left there.

the integration into yahoo never really happened. the upcoming team rebuilt the site on yahoo's php stack in 2008 and the rebuild was the last major release. by 2010 the site looked dated, by 2012 it looked abandoned. yahoo at that time was working through a long sequence of post-acquisition shutdowns under different ceos, from terry semel through scott thompson, and upcoming was on the list.

~ the postmortem ~

yahoo announced the shutdown of upcoming, alongside several other product deaths, in april 2013. the marissa mayer era's cleanup pass closed delicious's bookmarks tier plus mybloglog, and upcoming was on the same batch. the formal shutdown date was april 30 2013. all upcoming.yahoo.com urls began redirecting to the yahoo home page on the same day. the archive of events with their watchers and comments was wiped.

the wipe was the part baio took the hardest. he wrote a public note on waxy.org calling for an archive effort and reached out to the internet archive about scraping what they had. the response was strong enough that by mid 2013 a large fraction of the public upcoming pages was preserved on wayback. baio later bought the upcoming.org domain back from yahoo in 2014, ran a kickstarter that funded a rebuild, and relaunched a small version of the service in april 2017 with the archive of historical urls pointing at wayback snapshots where the originals had been lost.

~ the funny part ~

i was not around for either the original or the revival. the funny part from a distance is that upcoming kept being relevant in a way the other social-events products around it did not. dodgeball is gone and gowalla is gone too. baio is still running the small revived upcoming.org under his own name, has been for nearly a decade now. the version of upcoming that is alive in 2026 is a small archive plus a slow trickle of art-and-technology events posted by the original blogger crowd that used it in 2005. the yahoo years are the dead part of the story. the indie continuation outlived the corporate acquisition.

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