tourb.us

A couple of entries back I complained about the problems I had getting up and running with MOG. According to their latest newsletter they’ve found the elusive database index needed to radically speed up their import process, but I have yet to find the inclination to give it another go.

One of the reasons I found it quite so frustrating was that I’d recently been beta testing tourb.us, a live music website that allows you to build a set of favourite artists and will keep you informed on when those artists are going to be in your area.

Despite some early problems with Safari (which I believe are now fixed, though I tend to use Camino so haven’t checked) the site was very easy to get into, and the option to seed your profile with favourites imported from last.fm meant a profile could be up and running in very little time. You can subscribe to lists of shows by particular artists or in a given area by RSS or iCalendar so it’s also easy to keep in touch.

The site’s listings are still far from comprehensive. They rely on a selection of screen scrapers and user input to keep up to date which–as anyone tracking the Grand Rapids metro on upcoming.org can testify–needs a critical mass of users to be reliable. The guys are very responsive, however, and open to suggestions of new sites to scrape, so hopefully it will grow quickly.

What I like most about tourb.us is that it feels like a light solution that will play well with other music-related sites. It’d be good to see clearer connections to a service like Music Brainz to help identify artists beyond their names (ever so useful if people want to build further services on top), but there’s time for that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Notes. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 comments

  1. gary
    July 12, 2006 at 2:38 pm

    Hi, James. Hopefully you will be patient with us, we are trying to hard to expand to new areas and integrate services such as music brainz (that’s one of our most common requests).

    Thanks for the writeup!

  2. James Stewart
    July 12, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    No problem.

    I’ll try my best to be patient — that’s one of the reasons I didn’t cover extending the service to include the UK too 🙂

  4. Carl
    October 3, 2006 at 3:30 pm

    Hi James,

    If you like tourb, you will love BeeThere.net. BeeThere has been live since October 2005, has the features you request here, and is clearly the site that tourb is trying to imitate. I would love to hear what you think!

    Thanks,

    -Carl