metro skyline

Metro Skyline was to be "phase two" of the project "Madiscene" which never made it out of phase one.

Like most of the ideas I've worked on, as soon as I can see the finish line my brain explodes and turns the simplest thing into an epic enterprise. Madiscene was no differeent.

Designed as a response to being unable to find something to do on short notice (or missing-out on something cool), Madiscene was created to be "the shortest distance between you and something to do". This might sound like a solved problem but it's important to consider that work on Madiscene began before the year 2000, long before Facebook (or even Google Calendar) so the idea of having one place to find out about nearby events was something fairly unheard of. Essentially a database of events and the places they happen, Madiscene could help you find something to do regardless of who was hosting it or where it was happening without having to surf-through a constellation of venue or entertainer websites.

That was the idea anyway. Ultimately it didn't get off the ground for a number of reasons. It could be that individual bars, bands, clubs, etc. didn't see the point in sharing their calendars "for free" with some website when they could post on their own website. It could also have been that in the late 90's nobody wanted to sign-up for a website to be told what to do or where to go. It could have simply been before it's time. Or maybe it was just that we were better at building something than we were at marketing it. In any event, the site didn't go very far once it was operational and eventually we lost interest and moved on to other things.

...but once we started to see it "work", the gears started turning and we could see the potential for a "federation" of "'scene" websites across the world. Every city could use one, and they could coordinate to serve areas that might not need a site of their own. Once you had this amount of data you could start to characterize not only the venues and the entertainment, but you could observe how people used the site as well. By analyzing this data you could potentially predict the future, recommending what type of music a venue should book during a certain season, or suggesting a new type of event to a user based on what they previously enjoyed, etc. This is what today we'd call big data, but at the time we didn't have those terms. We talked about this as the "dna" of a venue, or a personality and we envisioned Metro Skyline as a system that connected all of these local "scenes" together, analyzed them and perhaps predicted the future.

Of course at the time this seemed absurd to anyone we tried to describe it to, and it seemed pretty fanciful to ourselves as well. I think had we managed to get Madiscene off-the-ground we would have pursued it (and potentially accomplished something) but the tech climate at the time wasn't favoring risk or exploration (the dot-com bubble having recently burst) and we were too inexperienced to know that we just needed to give the whole thing more time before we would know whether or not it could work.

It's not hard to imagine how Madiscene and Metro Skyline could have evolved into what we now call "social networks" and having been prescent, might have grown into something grand. Knowing myself I'm not sure I would have followed that path even if it had presented itself, but it's an interesting thought-experiment to consider on a cold January afternoon. Regardless I always had an affinity for the name "Metro Skyline" and if I ever had another project that it would make sense for I would love to see it put to use, even if the window of opportunity for its original vision has long since closed.

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