There are a number of ways to find out if one of your favorite bands is going to play a show in your area. But what about letting your friends know about the show? You could just email them -- or, if the show happens to have been entered on Attendio (most likely by their label), you could embed an Attendio widget on your blog, MySpace page, or wherever. Visitors would be able to see that you're going, and then buy tickets for themselves.
This sounds okay in theory. In practice, Attendio currently only has widgets for large-scale bands such as The reunited Police (possibly almost slightly tolerable), and a bunch of acts that I, for one, cannot stand (music is subjective, what are you going to do): Gwen Stefani, Counting Crows, Beyonce, Vans Warped Tour (granted there's some variety there), 311, and Third Eye Blind. Yowza.
If every show listed by Attendio had a widget associated with it, the sitewould be a lot more useful. I found an upcoming Deerhunter show on Attendio, and I would have embedded that widget here, but it doesn't exist.
Social networking products don't work if the content only comes fromthe top down (i.e. Gwen Stefani's marketing company). If Attendio wantsthis touring widget to be useful to users as well as marketers, they'llallow anyone to enter shows and create widgets for those shows.
Update: As a comment below shows, there is in fact a way for users to create their own event widget. (I still think it'd be cooler if there were a widget already available for each show listed on the site, but this goes a long way towards resolving my gripe).
