Thinking of adding some social / interactivity features to openmikes.org – nothing major, just something to make it more interesting / useful to players, and maybe inspire them to contribute more updates.

I’m thinking of a lightweight registration – just gimme an email and a handle, no spam will be sent, the email’s not displayed, just for verification. And an optional URL. Then, you can log in and mark a given open mike, on a given day, with “I’m going”. So musical acquaintances might better answer the question “is it worth going to… tonight”. And of course, clicking on your name in the displayed list would lead to your upcoming open mike “calendar”, for all to see – with a link to that optional URL of yours. Note that this registration would only be required if you wanted to add your info in this way - I would never put up the slightest barrier to actually viewing the listings.

And now that you can do this, you’ll want to add that night you’re checking out that’s not in our database yet, just so you can add the wonderfulness of you.

Second thought might be lowering the barrier to entry for adding a night – I currently don’t add them if I can’t find a solid address, etc. Might arguably be better to allow the “incomplete” data in, with explicit requests displayed for the rest of the data.

And if I did that, then perhaps an automated click-the-email-link-to-verify system to get new nights posted more quickly (currently, there’s a bottleneck, and its name is me).

Thoughts? Suggestions? Altoids?

Update, March 8, 2006: Starting to work on some of this. Beta-testers wanted.