If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’re probably quite familiar with TangoMango, an extensive online community calendar that lists Argentine tango events. The site has grown to become the number one resource for tango dancers in California since it was launched over ten years ago. It’s also well known in a few other metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. But tango dancers in most other areas of the country are less likely to visit the site and may not even have heard about it. If, for example, you were to find yourself in Hamilton County, Nebraska, and wanted to discover local milongas, you’d probably end up browsing the web for the individual websites of local organizers and venues instead of searching on TangoMango, as you might have done in the Bay Area or the Los Angeles area.
Don’t worry, most likely you wouldn’t have much success anyway in finding an event in Hamilton County, Nebraska (or in most other states all over the country) on TangoMango, even though the county itself appears on the website’s complete list of every state’s counties. Most organizers who are not close to one of the major metropolitan areas mentioned on TangoMango’s home page are unaware of the fact that they could easily post their event for free on this user-friendly nation-wide calendar, regardless of where they’re based. Instead, most tango teachers or hosts are more likely to promote their going-ons in the traditional and time-consuming ways of either sending out E-mail newsletters to a limited number of addressees on their own mailing lists, or by going through the process of creating separate web-listings, which, for people unfamiliar with the local tango scene, are hard to find.
TangoMango is a lot easier to use and reaches a much bigger audience. It’s the most comprehensive, and at the same time the most under-utilized, web service in Argentine tango. I’m curious to find out why. According to Stuart Schmukler of the Bay Area Argentine Tango Association (which maintains the site), TangoMango receives already as many as 10,000 hits a month from all over the country — even though most people search only a limited number of locations and only a relatively small number of locations have event listings.
I’m trying to guess how many more visitors would click on the site if more organizers were to post their events on this free listing-service. Stuart assumes that the fact that the site remains unknown to most tangueros in the country could be because of the limited and somewhat misleading layout of the homepage. This might lead users to believe that only the highlighted metropolitan areas shown on the homepage are covered, namely ‘San Francisco & Northern California’, ‘Los Angeles & Southern California’, ‘Chicago Area’, and ‘Miami & Southern Florida’. The link ‘Other Cities’, at the bottom of the right-hand navigation column, seems to be too small for users to start a search for possible Argentine tango events in other communities, and as a result organizers don’t bother using the site for areas other than those highlighted on the homepage.
Once you dig down into the menu that starts with the link ‘Other Cities’, however, you’ll find an amazing wealth of possibilities. The menu allows you to post and to search for events in any specific location, however small or remote your community might be. You start the search for tango events by state, then in alphabetical order of counties in that state. The number of events in any particular county appears after its name and is clearly highlighted before you even click on it to get to the details. New locations can be added by organizers posting for the first time. Stuart explains that as webmaster he continues to add new places whenever he learns about an unlisted tango community.
TangoMango is thus a continually growing search-engine for Argentine tango. What sounds a bit pedestrian in comparison to major search-engines has actually been a labor of love, created in countless hours over many years with minimal funding by volunteers of the San Francisco tango community. It originally started as a community calendar created by David Hudsness in 2006 when he was a member of the Bay Area Argentine Tango Association. When Hudsness moved away, the Tango Association took it over, moved the system to another hosting server and stabilized it.
The unique web service fit right into The Bay Area Argentine Tango Association’s mission, which is to promote Argentine Tango. The association was founded in 1995 as a non-profit educational and cultural organization with the goal of holding public Argentine tango events, which up till then had only been held in private places. It started with just ten members when the cast of ‘Forever Tango’ took up residence in San Francisco, and Argentine tango suddenly became hugely popular. The Bay Area Argentine Tango Association then began not only to organize public tango events, but also to create newsletters and a tango lexicon with etiquette and codes, becoming more or less the main resource for everything tango. At its peak the association counted as many as 500 members who paid an annual fee of $35, but membership declined as information became widely available for free over the internet. Today, the association still holds approximately five to six public milongas at Union Square in San Francisco (known as ‘Tango in the Square’), and continues to support public dance events and other outreach programs. Its main flagship is TangoMango, but few people are aware of that.
Stuart Schmukler, who is also the association’s president, has been the site’s webmaster ever since David Hudsness’ departure, maintaining it for the last couple of years. He works on it whenever his time allows, meaning when he’s not occupied with his job as a high-tech consultant in Silicon Valley or fulfilling his various other duties as head of the association. He keeps improving the site not just by continuously adding new locations, but by also adding links for resources such as tango literature and movies. He has even built a donation page to help keep the site running.
It’s extremely easy to use. “It’s a self-listing site,” Stuart explains, “and anybody can post. All you need is a user ID.” The site doesn’t even require a password. “We’ve done away with that,” he smiles. “Since most users are artists and can’t be bothered to remember such things as passwords.” By signing up for the website, you can post your own tango event in the clearly structured format that has been provided, including location, date, time and a short description. And then bingo! — once your event has been posted and goes live, it can easily be found by anybody from anywhere.
Even though the site is unique and easy to use, there have been many attempts to compete with it. Several people have tried to come up with other, supposedly better, tango calendar services, none of which have become reality. When I ask Stuart about this, he says: “I know! But surprisingly, none of these people have ever contacted us. We would have been open to new ideas, but all these people have tried to come up with something new by themselves.”
One last question: I’m curious to know where the name TangoMango came from? For the first time during our conversation, Stuart looks a bit embarrassed and admits that he doesn’t know. But then, who exactly knows where the name “Google” came from? In the end, what counts is that the name is easy to remember and that hopefully the site will continue to grow.
The site can be found at http://www.tangomango.org