I have recently set up my next performance as a Facebook event. It’s the Grande Messe des Morts by Berlioz in Colston Hall, Bristol, on Saturday February 13th at 7.30 p.m., performed by the South West Festival Chorus and Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jason Thornton with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as tenor soloist and Gavin Carr as chorus master.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=319863580358&ref=mf
http://www.colstonhall.org/whatson/Event1260
I can invite my Facebook friends to this event, and they can in turn invite others; it’s completely open. But the facility to browse events is essentially useless. The most focussed you can get is to browse all musical concerts, and of course there are a multitude of those. It used to be possible (say) to see ‘What’s on in Bristol’ on a given night and be shown a list of public Facebook events in that place that night but you can’t do this now (I suspect it went when networks were dropped). I once created minor trouble by setting up an event which had admission by pre-booked ticket to an invited audience, in order to find out who else was going to it. Tickets weren’t checked on the door, and several people came along having found out via Facebook about the distinguished performers and got in free. I’m not terribly sorry about this, as there was space enough for everyone.
Returning to my Berlioz concert, the event doesn’t show up on Facebook searches. This means I can’t tell members of the choir how to get hold of it and advertise it to Facebook friends – only those who are my FB friends, or who have been invited by them, are going to come across the page. This strikes me as a serious flaw.