Reader Matt Feldman of Yelo.us has pointed out a new feature in Places where Google is now integrating venue events into their Places Pages. It allows an individual to add the event data to their personal Google calendar and to “invite friends using the ‘Add to calendar’ link that appears alongside the event”.
Google has confirmed that they are adding these events to venues “in a few major cities across the globe, including New York, San Francisco, London, Paris (and others)” and this “information is based on data from rich snippets markup“.
Wcities and Zevents events use the RDFa based Open Graph data structure. Other events appearing on the National Museum of the American Indian Places page from NYC.com are sructured with the event microformat (vcard) formatting. Although it does not seem to matter which format you are using, if you are operating a local site that includes events and you want your event information included in Places, you should be formatting the data with rich snippets.
I hope to see this get launched with many notable cities included real soon.
Comment by Andy (14 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 6:51 am
Great info. Are you aware of any WP event plug-ins that support the required rich snippet format?
Comment by Jack (7 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 9:17 am
This is GREAT! I think its a good move on Google. It will truly engage the user to the business.
Comment by Cristina (1 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 9:20 am
@Jack
I don’t but it would be a good one…
Comment by Mike (2500 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 10:17 am
I think this is a great feature. Any word yet on whether the business’s participation may contribute to rankings?
Comment by Lee (19 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 1:18 pm
@Lee
I it is unlikely to have much ranking affect beyond that which exists by virute of a venue already giving their event data to as many sites as possible…. whether it leads to more customers for the venue will depend on other Google pushes the data out in a way that end users see it and and use it.
Comment by Mike (2500 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 1:58 pm
Thanks Mike, seems like the more engaged a business is with their page the better off they’ll be in a whole lot of ways. I appreciate your thoughts.
Comment by Lee (19 comments) — April 26, 2011 @ 2:10 pm
[...] were a number of new features that appeared in Places and in the 7 Pack including the inclusion of event information on venue Place pages and pushing the ppc hotel booking feature to the front page. There were several that I did not have [...]
Pingback by Google Place Page Changes | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search — May 2, 2011 @ 5:02 am
Nice. This could be a great differentiator for for local businesses that hold events.
Also, a bit late, but, re Jack’s question about WP plugins…
Gigpress, which I’ve re-purposed for general events before, uses hcalendar – that might do the trick?
http://microformats.org/wiki/wordpress-plugins#GigPress
Comment by Bede Fahey (6 comments) — May 7, 2011 @ 10:47 pm
Look forward to them doing this for restaurants. A four-top at 7pm could be considered an event. Would of course require a program to handle the dynamic table inventory of a restaurant, but easy for the Goog.
If Google intends to coordinate and manage the social calendar, scheduling restaurant tables seems like it is next on the list.
Integrated with calendar and friend invites – exact same business justification for Google. Goodbye OpenTable.
Comment by brazil_83 (1 comments) — May 29, 2011 @ 7:49 pm
[...] introduced a restaurant reservation system on their Place page equivalent. This spring when Google added rich snippet events to the Places page, they integrated the ability to easily add those events to [...]
Pingback by Google Calendar Appointment Slots – Infrastructure for Places Scheduling? | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search — June 8, 2011 @ 7:48 am
@ Jack, You said “Are you aware of any WP event plug-ins that support the required rich snippet format?”
I believe there is a plugin called “GD Star Rating” that does support the Google rich snippet format.
Comment by Tisha (1 comments) — August 15, 2011 @ 10:45 pm
FYI, the mobile press version of the sites doesnt offer +1 buttons like the full version does…
Thanks for the post, filed under todo
Comment by Jason (43 comments) — April 9, 2012 @ 9:38 am