More 'Upcoming' for Yahoo! Local

Yahoo! announced that it had acquired upcoming.org (a Flickr-like events calendar that is user-driven). This is going to bolster Yahoo!'s already very strong Local product by adding more user-generated content in the events area. The events RSS feed in Yahoo! Local is a great piece of functionality, but the data right now are limited and incomplete. This will substantially improve that aspect of the product.

But more broadly (as I wrote in "Yahoo! Building Social into Local"), Yahoo! is building and buying an impressive array of "social search" assets that the company can deploy and leverage across its network — not just Local.

More after I get briefed by Yahoo!'s Local GM Paul Levine (who will be part of "The Role of User-Generated Content and Community" panel (scroll) at ILM:05).

UPDATE: So I just spoke with Paul Levine and Upcoming.com principal Andy Baio for about 15 minutes. Upcoming had been a part-time project but will now get the resources it needs/deserves, and Yahoo! will attempt to integrate this with the many other socially oriented things it's doing across the network.

The challenge, of course, is how to bring it all together in an elegant way. Regardless, it's more muscle for Yahoo!'s FUSE strategy: find, use, share, expand.