Eventful

Eventful is a social networking site that allows loose or formal groups to create gatherings. Groups can be based on physical location, interests, subjects, and events.

You can create groups or join groups that you have interest in. You can search through the many groups that are available through a system based search engine.

To use Eventful, you first need to set up a user account. To register, click on the top right register link. Registration requires an email address, username, password, zip code, and year of birth. You must accept the terms of service. It takes about a minute.

Once you have registered you can begin to create and/or join groups. To join a group, find a group you are interested in. Towards the right top corner of the screen, you will see a button labled "Join this group". Once you are a member of a group you may post events to that group.

Eventful also allows you to generate a "widget" that you can post on your own site. This widget will pull an RSS feed from the group you are interested in and display those results on your site. From that widget you can subscribe to the RSS feed or pull data directly into iCAL.

We've integrated this into the secondife.techsoup.org site to follow events from the nonprofits in secondlife members.

How is this different than upcoming.com and how is it similar to it and to Meetup.com?

It's similar to upcoming.org in functionality. It allows groups of people to easily share events info with each other and publicize them to a wider audience. Events can be exported in various formats, include google calendar and outlook and iCal.

Meetup is somewhat different. Meetup is better at meeting planning. Eventful is a shared calendaring service. I would use Meetup to set up a local knitting group, I would use eventful to organize a national knitting related calendar of events.

Thanks for clarifying this distinction. With so many event/meeting sites out there, it's helpful to have insights like this to evaluate what might be a better tool for the kind of event or meeting planning you are looking to do.

--Megan