How Eventbrite Recommends Events Based on Your Social Network

A system that suggests events to you by analyzing your social media connections and your past attendance history to see what your friends are doing.

What it covers

This patent describes a method for an event management system to suggest events to a user by pulling data from an external social network. It creates an internal map of the user's connections and looks at their event history to score how important those connections are. The system then ranks available events by combining this social data with specific event details like cost, location, and type. For example, if three of your close friends are attending a concert, the system uses this patent's logic to rank that concert higher on your personalized recommendation list.

What it doesn't cover

• —Does not cover recommendations based solely on a user's own past behavior without considering social network data.
• —Does not cover systems that recommend events based on global popularity or trending lists rather than specific social connections.
• —Does not cover the actual mechanism of how a third-party social network stores or manages its own social graph data.
• —Does not cover offline or non-digital methods of event discovery or social networking.

The clever bit

The system doesn't just look at whether a friend is attending an event; it calculates a weighted score for the 'friend connection' itself, factoring in how often the two users have attended events together in the past.

Why it matters

This patent represents the shift toward social discovery in the early 2010s, where platforms moved from static listings to personalized feeds. It reflects the industry-wide effort to increase event attendance by leveraging the 'fear of missing out' (FOMO) through social validation. By formalizing how social graphs influence event discovery, it helped companies like Eventbrite integrate directly with platforms like Facebook to drive ticket sales.

Real-world examples

• 1.Eventbrite's personalized event discovery feed
• 2.Facebook Events recommendations
• 3.Meetup's social-based event suggestions