Facebook's new Simple Events: the pros and cons

Facebook have changed the events page. You may have noticed the new widget on the homepage which gives you a quick 2 box interface for making events. It’s a lot simpler than the old process and people are generally saying it’s a good thing.

Well – we had a little think about this yesterday evening, and you know what – there downsides to making events easier to make. Here are the pros and cons as we see them of the new Facebook Events system:

The Pros
1) Events are easier to make
2) Because they’re easier, social stuff that wouldn’t have been organised through Facebook events before (meeting your friend at the pub) will now become events.

The Cons
1) More events and more little events mean that that bigger events get flooded out by things like “Meet Mike in the Bar” and “Let’s go see Iron Man 2”.
In a stream of dozens of mini-events it’s harder to spot the important things like “Your Best Friend’s Birthday Party”.
2) For club promoters and night organisers, it makes Facebook a less good platform to publicise events on, because it puts their big night on a par with you meeting your friend in the pub.
3) Facebook is so damn busy, this just makes it even busier.