TakeTheKids goes from five city feeds to 51 in 42 states
A father who got tired of checking library, park and museum calendars one by one now runs a free family-event feed for 51 American cities. The expansion landed this month.
TakeTheKids expanded this month from five metro feeds to 51 city feeds covering 42 states, according to the company. The public city directory on its site lists them.
The service gives each city its own feed. It collects events from local venue sources and lets parents filter by date, distance, cost, age and category.
Peter Kim built it after planning weekends with his children turned into the same repetitive task. Library calendars, parks departments, museums, city pages and local event sites, each checked separately, then cross-referenced for which listings were still current and which suited the ages involved.
The company says the feeds refresh daily. Browsing is free and does not require an account, on any city.
The stated aim is not another list of ten things to do this weekend. It is to keep the local calendars that already carry useful family events and make them searchable in one consistent format.
A parent deciding what to do on Saturday can narrow a single feed to nearby free events for the right ages. That replaces repeating the same search across several sites.
Each city's results stay separate rather than being merged into one national listing. The company describes the expansion as turning a handful of local feeds into a national family-event service while preserving that separation.
The 51 feeds are the number a reader can check. TakeTheKids has not published audience figures, and the company has not said how the service makes money or whether it intends to.
Nor has it said how many events sit behind each feed, or how the sources for a new city are chosen.
For founders building on top of public local data, the model here is worth noting. The work is not in generating content; it is in normalising calendars that already exist and were never designed to be compared with one another.
The cost of that approach is maintenance. Fifty-one cities means 51 sets of local sources that can change format, move or go quiet, and the daily refresh is what the whole proposition rests on.
The directory at takethe.kids is where the count can be verified, city by city, without signing up.
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