Facebook Launches Events Discovery To Help iOS Users Find Nearby Events

The new mobile feature, available for people in 10 major US cities, is the leading edge of Facebook's effort to improve the Events product.

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Facebook is working to make Facebook Events a more useful what-to-do app.

Today, the company announced an update to its iOS app that gives people in 10 major US cities the ability to browse through Facebook Events in their location. Within the new discovery feature, in the Events dashboard, people will see events sorted by categories such as music, food & drink, nightlife and sports or fitness. They will also be able to switch locations to check out events in other cities.

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The catch is that the feature currently can only be seen by people using their iPhones in major cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Houston and Washington, DC. But a wider rollout and extension to Android devices is likely, considering the increased emphasis Facebook has put on Events in the past few months.

Events are something of a sleeping giant for the company; in July it announced that the service is used by 450 million people monthly, but Facebook staffers have acknowledged it needs a lot of work.

Some of those efforts have started to come into focus, including more public events being shown in people’s News Feeds, smarter notifications and surfacing of related events. With so much data about what people do and like, building a stronger Events product is a natural step.

“We have a good sense of how people look for things to do,” Facebook product manager Aditya Koolwal told Wired last month. “The social signals we have, the friends who are interested in going, the friends you can potentially go with — that’s our bread and butter, so we’re going to try and take advantage of that as much as we possibly can as we roll out more discovery features.”


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck is Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for MarTech and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.

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