Posted:Jul 1, 2007

A Better Sense of Community

Since mid May, we have started implementing on the website a series of features that are designed to make it easier to use and more community-oriented.

We are only half way through the push but I wanted to give you details on the new features so far:

– We have simplified MyTAB. We have kept only 2 icons: you can save an event that you want to see to your My Events list, or add it to your Seen Events list if you have seen it. Clean and simple, and useful for the community as this data is now shared and public (more on this below). We have also simplified the email alerts so that they are now global.

– Next to each event name, we now display the number of people who are planning on seeing it, and the number of people who have visited it. This data is pooled from the global MyTAB data and has a few benefits. Certainly it makes us feel like we are part of a community, but also it helps us recommend events to the other users of the site.
If you still haven’t created your MyTAB account, please sign up (of course it’s free).

– Reusing the data pooled from MyTAB, we have created a shortlist of the 20 most popular events on TAB. The ranking is made by checking for each event how many people have saved it and marked it as Seen on MyTAB, as well as other factors such as duration and days before ending. We hope that it will help irregular visitors to the site or tourists coming to Tokyo find quickly the most worthy current or upcoming events.
The list is accessible from the blue lists (Smart Lists) menu in the right column.
And of course we have an RSS feed available for this list too. Check our complete list of RSS feeds.

We have also added another smart list for the German Year in Japan events, where all events on TAB related to the year-long celebration are regrouped.

Now for the next features, we are looking into opening the site even more to the community and are building options to make your MyTAB lists public, to share them on the site or on your blog (like a blogroll), MyTAB RSS feeds and iCal exports, and much more. Stay tuned.

As always, we depend on your feedback for the new features. Let us know what you like, what you dislike and what you want in the comments below or by mail:
contact(AT)tokyoartbeat.com

Paul Baron

Paul Baron

Born in 1977 in Paris. After graduating in 2002 from the London College of Communication, he moved to Tokyo to taste Japan's powerful visual culture. He worked for 3 years at Honda R&D as an interaction designer and in 2004 launched Tokyo Art Beat with Olivier and Kosuke.