Yeah, it's true for me. I barely use messenger anymore (married the person I wrote the most with), and even then I use it via Trillian. I open facebook maybe 2-3 times per week to check events and that's it. But with all their crappy UX, events is still better than alternatives to see what friends are doing and what's going on locally.
I lived in NYC for a few years, and every so often I'd find myself wandering around the city on a weekend afternoon, wondering what I should do. Ideally, there'd be an app where I could simply open it up, look at a map, set it to the current time or maybe within an hour or so, and easily see events near me.
That app just does not exist. You can get kinda close with a few apps, but not really. In this context, I don't care what my friends are doing, I just want to find something cool period.
In many places, the list of "things happening this hour on a weekend afternoon within 10-20 minutes of where I am right now that I might possibly be interested in" approaches zero.
On the other hand, if there is a huge list of events happening close to you soon at any given time, the problem is "that I might possibly be interested in." The "things my friends expressed interest in" is useful not just because my friends might be there (although that can be a plus, or a prompt to text one of em and say hey you wanna go to this), but because if a buncha my friends are interested in it, that makes it more likely it will be something that will appeal to me, because my friends in aggregate are more likely than random to be interested in things I am.
This led me to spending something like 30-45 minutes trudging through various websites, the local paper, etc. I eventually found about 3-5 different options.
Simply broaden the definition of "things happening" and the number is definitely not zero.
It kind of sucks that they have a monopoly on events except maybe Resident Advisor which is sometimes better than Facebook for Techno and House parties. But they are missing the invite and seeing what other people are doing that aren't in to my niche music.
There are literally only three ways out:
1) Create an events alternative for a niche group. This is what RA is, but it could easily also be for a university (like Highkey is doing for college events) or for a certain local area.
2) One of the other media giants creates an events alternative. Google, Twitter, Snapchat. That could still somehow work out.
3) Find a way to piggyback off FB's users/events. Seems like this would need to be done in some way that is clearly against their TOS, but we have seen startups form in similar means anyway. I already see some spam by sites that scrape events and attendee lists from FB, but they all seem to be in it just for the short run.
I suspect that events will be one of the last things keeping people on Facebook generally, just like music and artist pages kept MySpace going for years after losing relevance otherwise.
I'd like to see some case studies of success, because it was a lot of effort with very little show for it, and I'm fresh out of ideas (and goodwill).
It's definitely intentional, because older versions of the Facebook APIs had this functionality, but it was later removed...
Funny enough, this is the main reason I don't use the Going/Interested buttons on Facebook anymore. I'm not a fan of having my activity broadcast to everyone on my friends list.
But, yeah, it's hard to go to something else cause of the friction.
What we really need is something that is as integrated into fb events as fb, but _also_ allows people who aren't on fb to find and keep track of and RVSP to events.
I think facebook API's don't really allow you to have that kind of integration for a third-party thing though. I would assume this is intentional.
(I find out about a lot of events on fb not by searching for events, but by facebook timeline telling me "your fb friend is interested/going to this event. If you can figure out a way to approach that kind of experience with your non-fb thing, it might help).