Show HN: Things to Do API

1 day ago (thingstodoapi.com)

I built an api/mcp for local events: pop-ups, one-off events, concerts, etc. currently covering the SF bay area.

I've been building a bunch of consumer apps lately around personalization and recommendation and have had a hard time finding this data in one spot. agents can find useful stuff through tool calls / web search, but slow.

you can scrape on demand too, but i wanted a faster data set and couldn't find an existing provider for the mix of event types I was searching for.

the methodology for it is to find influential accounts/posters/etc. and do a fan out across things that they co-post with.

mcp: `claude mcp add --transport http thingstodo https://api.thingstodoapi.com/mcp`

I'm considering adding other cities. If you're building something that needs local event data, would something like this be useful and where would you want coverage?

17 comments

invalidmonk

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tokioyoyo  33 minutes ago

Which sources does it support? Discoverability is a huge problem for smaller events, as most get posted on IG, and it’s hard to even find them through IG.

I started relying on a mix of Muse/ChatGPT/Gemini depended on which data sources I want to combine, as they all seem to have special deals with different sources.

  • invalidmonk  25 minutes ago

    at the moment, there is a fan out across social media accts from a few different platforms, relying mostly on co-posting to discover new accounts.

    any particular events that you'd flag that I could do some eval against?

shrinks99  1 hour ago

This is pretty cool, does it scrape Instagram? A lot of events where I live (Toronto) are posted there and not many other places. It's a real problem if you don't want to spend time on that app.

  • invalidmonk  1 hour ago

    amongst a few other data sources :) is this something you'd use if we added toronto support?

    • shrinks99  41 minutes ago

      Personally, I don't have a project that requires it right now, but aspirationally maybe! I agree with another commenter that mentioned this is basically a public service that should exist similar to Wikidata / Musicbrainz.

      I know this is currently a paid service you're trying to make happen and the scraping part is a reasonable amount of effort, but if you wanted to make the data source public, you could publish community.lexicon.calendar.event ATProto records and it would be very cool. At the very least, you could ingest it as a data source!

fellowniusmonk  3 hours ago

Solving this issue a core problem for humanity, and it goes hand in hand with the need for a public service.

I'm actually working to do this at ultra low cost as a public service like Wikipedia or musicbrainz.

I'll be publishing global costs to serve and letting people donate to support.