Zvents seems to be generating a lot of buzz lately. Scoble even thinks this is a signal of the incoming doom for Yahoo! and MS mapping platforms, and that Google will be the winner, in the end.
Personally, I started playing with it just to see whether it would be useful to link OSZone Conferences pages to Zvents events. The problem, at the moment, is that the events available on Zvents are quite few and limited to the San Francisco Bay Area. You can create events for other locations, but you can’t search by location name then.
So I limited myself to add a couple of Zvents links here and here. It would be cool to be able to automatically perform a search using Zvents APIs when a new conference is displayed and, if a match is found, link to the relevant Zvents page. This however presumes that the conference name as stored in OSZone and Zvents are similar enough to find one and only one match when searching.
Also, I’m still trying to understand what benefit an OSZone user would derive from clicking through Zvents, apart from a cool map. If it’s just the map, we could simply integrate Google Maps directly in OSZone. Now that I think about it, why not?
