Yahoo seems to have learned a few things from its bungled transition of Flickr and has applied those lessons to Upcoming.org, namely, if you bribe users with free t-shirts they don't seem to mind changes.
Upcoming, the popular calendar and event listing service, now lives as a subdomain of the Yahoo empire and users were recently forced to transition from their old Upcoming IDs to Yahoo IDs. However to ease the pain of the changes, Upcoming has undergone a mild redesign and is giving away t-shirts to placate old school members.
As Pete Cashmore of Mashable quipped “yes, you lose your identity, but you'll be fully clothed.”
In an additional move that was suggested, but never implemented in the Flickr transition, old school Upcoming members will get to display badges touting the fact that they were hip enough to have joined prior to when Upcoming was swallowed by the behemoth.
The amazing part is that Upcoming users seem to be buying all of this, proving once again that for the hipster crowd, free t-shirts will always trump vague suspicions about selling out to “the man.”
And there is perhaps no greater selling out than transitioning from a .org domain to the Yahoo domain.
On the brighter side, the redesigned Upcoming has few new features, including a listing of popular local events, a “community picks” section and — surprise — tighter integration with other Yahoo properties like Flickr and Yahoo Local.
