Eventbrite Makes Events More Social By Meshing Deeper With Facebook

Online ticketing startup Eventbrite is amping up the social features of its service by creating deeper hooks with Facebook. When you purchase a ticket through Eventbrite (like you can for Disrupt, for instance), you can already share that purchase with your Facebook friends. But now Eventbrite will be adding a deeper layer of integration with Facebook to power social event discovery.

Later today, when you log into Eventbrite with your Facebook ID, you will start to see all the Eventbrite events your Facebook friends are going to. It will show you a list of social recommendations based on the Eventbrite tickets your friends have bought and chosen to share publicly. It is all opt-in. Activities ned to be shared publicly on an event-by-event basis, and only if the event organizer has made the event itself public.

Eventbrite is calling this a new “event graph” (like a social graph for events), but it is only for Eventbrite events. There are shades of Plancast in the new feature (hi, Mark). Plancast, which itself is integrated with Eventbrite, lets you share events no matter whether you bought a ticket or not.

But Eventbrite actually does sell tickets and makes money on each ticket sold. The more that people share the events they are going to on Facebook, the more tickets Eventbrite and event organizers who use it sell. Now what if Facebook started tying its events to Eventbrite ticket sales, and maybe allowed people to use Facebook Credits to buy tickets. It’s just a thought, but you can see where all of this might go. Check out this interview we did last November with Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz.