September 30, 2012
When it comes to finding ways to fill your leisure time, you may take a rather lackadaisical approach to the process, basically waiting until the last minute to look for entertainment options or relying on family members and friends to clue you in to upcoming events. But this could lead to situations where you are unable to purchase tickets to the hottest shows, games, and other happenings in your area because you didn’t find out about them until it was too late. And while you can surf sites like Ticketmaster, FanSnap, Live Nation, and other ticket outlets, you can keep up with calendars for the many venues in your area, and you can follow the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of your favorite rock bands, sports teams, and other entertainers, this requires a lot of effort on your part. Wouldn’t you rather do all your searching in one place and keep track of your favorite entertainers and sports teams? Well, you’re in luck. The Eventster app can give you all of this and more.
The app is free to download on iTunes and you can quickly start browsing events in your area in a couple of ways. First, you can use the “free today?” feature to see what events are being held in your vicinity right now, in case you happen to find yourself with free time and in need of some immediate entertainment. And you can also look at a map to search by venue. But what’s bound to be more useful is the search functionality. With a database that includes listing for more than half a million events at any given time you’re sure to find all kinds of upcoming events that are either local or within easy travel distance. And you can not only search by location, date, category, and keyword (name of artist, sports team, etc.), but you can also browse what’s popular (as well as contribute to the relative popularity of events).
Each event listed may be given either a positive or negative rating (thumbs up or down) by users as a way to gauge the interest level. So if you’re not sure whether an event will be good or not, user ratings could help to clue you in to what’s hot and what’s not. And of course, you can also participate in the voting process. For example, if you’ve seen the Foo Fighters in concert before and you know how amazing their shows are (what with Dave Grohl running through the audience during the concert, musicians performing triangle solos, and the band coming back on stage to do five encores) you can give their upcoming concert a thumbs up to encourage other users to support the band. And when you give an event a positive vote, it is automatically bookmarked in the app (so you can look at your bookmarks for quick reference when deciding which upcoming events you’re most interested in).

You can also save items to your iCalendar for a quick snapshot of upcoming happenings by date and you can get on the Social Stream to see postings on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram related to events. Whether you want to get the Madison Square Garden schedule of events, you’re looking for everything from concerts and major sporting events to county fairs and craft shows, or you want to know when festivals are happening in your area, Eventster can help you out. You can’t order tickets through the app, but it can definitely keep you informed of your entertainment options.
Editor’s Note
Thanks to Evan Fischer for this guest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.
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