Disruptive Conversations

Here I was at the end of the work day just tying up a few loose ends.  One of the things I had on my list was to set up a Facebook event for O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference, upon whose program committee I sit.  Given that we're seeking speaking proposals, I thought that experimenting with Facebook might be an interesting way to get the word out within the tech crowd using Facebook.  However, I couldn't create an event for the ETel conference.  Why not?

Because Facebook won't let me create an event past October 2007!

Huh?

The conference is on March 3-4, 2008, and so I wondered if I was in trouble when I went to create an event and saw only this:

What's missing?  (click for a larger image)  Yes, indeed... there's no year in the start or end time.  Clue #1 that something was wrong.  My immediate reaction was that I was annoyingly going to have to click through the calendar "next" buttons to get to the right month.  So I started doing this and found, as you can see in the picture below, that Facebook events can't be set later than October 2007!

At least, I could find no way to do so.  If someone else can, please do let me know.

Now, even though it was most of 20 years ago, I do remember life as a college student and I do recall that my "event horizon" for planning was really only the next few days or weeks.  If it was farther out, it simply never entered my brain.  I'd worry about that sometime later... after the next round of projects or papers were due.  So perhaps Facebook is based on that mindset... if it's not within the next 2 or 3 months, you don't care!  (And I realize that certainly not all students fit into this stereotype and that there are some students who plan farther ahead.)

However, if Facebook does seriously want to get into the business space, they definitely do need to open up this window a bit more.  I've got conferences and events I know I'm going to 6months... 12 months out.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to network with other people planning to go to those conferences farther in advance?  Or if you are an organizer, wouldn't it be great to be able to promote the event within Facebook?