Leonard Lin is one of the co-founders of Upcoming.org, a popular social calendering service recently acquired by Yahoo. Upcoming takes event planning, promotion and attendance to the next level by supporting comments, groups, tags, RSS and much more. It makes several parts of events management easier and more efficient by utilizing new, social technologies.

I got to sit down with Leonard at the South by South West conference and we had a great talk about Upcoming and the future of web services and applications.

Leonard began by talking about Upcoming in the context of the emerging Web 2.0 world in general. He likes the way people in Yahoo! Search explain that social software is all about a process of "find-use-search-expand." (FUSE is the slogan, see this John Battelle post for further detail.)

The best applications are always collecting implicit metadata and don’t need everyone to create content in order to work well, he said. "For every 1 creator [of content]," Leonard told me, "there are 10 synthesizers and 100 beneficiaries."  He says this is an idea that gets talked about a lot at Yahoo! and recommended a recent post by Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo technology development, for a full discussion of the concept.

The badges that Upcoming offers are a good example of this.  Users can easily paste a bit of code into their web pages or blogs to display an automatically updating list of events related to a theme of their choice. (Made possible by RSS and javascript.)

To follow Leonard's logic above then: one group of people posts events to Upcoming, then a larger group displays badges highlighting events of interest on their own sites, and an even larger group of people discovers the events by visiting Upcoming, sites with badges displayed and search results favoring those events because of the inbound links provided by the distributed badges.

This is just one example of what Leonard referred to as the difference between social software and online community. Social software, he says, uses the web as a platform to augment what might otherwise be an exclusively human driven online community.

Upcoming has supported even further augmentation of their part of the social web since they began by offering an API (Application Programming Interface) for outside developers to build new applications and mashups on. 

Leonard is very excited about the future of web applications. He believes that the old model, dominated by Microsoft, was one that locked in users’ data - but that’s not the case today. He says that web applications today are basic infrastructure that people can count on and take data to and from easily.

Upcoming.org, for example, is not going to face serious service interruptions or close down. These types of established services are like the highways and the phone lines, all about interchange and connection in a way that directly effects our real, physical lives.

Leonard says we’re seeing infrastructure shift from a modern framework to a post-modern one.

If you’re not sure what that means, I’d encourage you to spend some time exploring Upcoming.org and its features - it’s a great example of the kind of cultural transformation the world is currently ungergoing.

Leonard Lin is a co-founder of Upcoming.org. He blogs at randomfoo.net. If you’d like to import an OPML file of bundled RSS feeds containing Leonard’s blog, announcements of new Upcoming.org services and features and all future interviews here at Net Squared - the following is a link you can use to import all three feeds at once into your feed reader:  upcomingnet2