Wevent: German Upcoming.org?

Once again an article on a German web application on Not So Relevant; this seems to become a regular feature. Well, this time it is Bremen based Wevent which was publicly launched last month and is in beta now. Wevent is an events calendar similar to Upcoming.org which was acquired by Yahoo in October 2005.

It is a great surprise that Wevent offers registration with an OpenID. Of course, users can also opt for traditional registration – email and password. If you decide to register with your OpenID you will be suprised that you can’t change or add anything on your profile page. Users can just add links to a couple of pre-defined social networks and social bookmarking sites; other profile features are managed on the OpenID provider’s site. If you want to display an image on your profile page you have to sign up with Gravatar; there is no other way.

As you can expect from an events calendar Wevent makes use of microformats, especially hCard and hCalendar. As far as I can tell they are properly implemented. Also all locations feature a Google Map (see image of the event details below):

You can also add photos to the event details. However it’s just possible to add photos from Flickr which are particularly tagged for Wevent because Wevent simply subscribes to that Flickr tag. For the example above it is wevent:event=53.

More features:

• subscriptions by RSS, Atom, and iCal to single events, groups, locations, and cities
• attend or watch events
• add friends

Considering that Wevent is still in a rather early stage of development it looks pretty good and actually very promising. Naturally its real potential will be revealed when more users join and add events.
Though I am a little bit skeptical if it is a good idea that basic features of a social media site are managed by other sites: complete profiles if registered with an OpenID, profile images (Gravatar), and also events images (Flickr); don’t forget Google Maps. Those sites could change their Terms of Service, simply block Wevent, be unavailable,… I don’t know if I felt comfortable relying on so many other services to run smoothly.