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Eventful Timebrokers Your Future
Eventful.com is a website devoted to helping users find events that are of interest to themselves and their friends. The site makes it easy to share this information with others and receive alerts for similar upcoming events.
Eventful also has a very cool feature that allows site regulars to request events that don't exist yet.
(Eventful users demand Herbie Hancock)
Science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo wrote a very cool short story about this very idea, carried to its logical extreme. In a world in which humanity does not need to sleep, people have blocks of time at all sorts of hours - and they want entertainment. Similarly, event organizers want some assurance that, if they book a particular artist or event, there will be enough attendees to make it worthwhile. Enter the timebroker:
A timebroker mediated between individuals and institutions, citizens and the government. Individuals registered their shifting schedules hour by hour with a timebroker of their choice. During such and such hours, they would be willing to work; during other hours, they were interested in attending a concert, a ball game, a university class, a gym. Contrarily, institutions registered their needs. The symphony wants a thousand listeners at four a.m. on Sunday. Can you provide them?
(Read more about Paul Di Filippo's timebrokers)
The parent company of the Eventful.com site was started in 2004, but the Eventful site itself is still in beta. Paul Di Filippo probably wrote the story sometime in 2005, so I'm not sure if this really counts as a "prediction," but the short story surely points creatively to the future of this kind of enterprise.
Thanks to Lou (I think) for the tip on the story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/26/2006)
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