Halloween 2.0: How Web Companies Trick and Treat

Halloween may have started as the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrating the New Year, but today it's a $5 billion industry with millions of children dressing up in costume for a night of trick and treat. And don't forget the myriad adults celebrating with parties -- both at the office and at home -- as well as parades. This year Web 2.0 companies have capitalized on the festive occasion providing a hauntingly good time for their customers.

Halloween 411

The Internet will serve as a source of valuable Halloween information for those in search of everything from fast holiday facts to the scoop on how others celebrate. Semantic search engine Hakia has created "galleries" for popular search terms, including "Halloween" and holiday-related words. The Hakia Galleries build upon the search engine's claim to deliver more relevant results than keyword-based engines such as Google by offering, according to COO Melek Pulatkonak, "10 searches in one." A search for "Halloween," for instance, not only brings up Halloween-related pages; it automatically organizes the results into categories like "origin of the holiday," "stories and literature," "holiday music," and "news and blogs."

For the Halloween party and parade seeker, Eventful, the Web's leading database of events, lists more than 9,000 Halloween events for visitors to browse. It rates as one of the site's most searched holidays, along with Valentine's Day. "It's a pretty social holiday, where you're not just with your family. People like to get out there and go out in their costumes," says Holly Anderson, Eventful's director of marketing. While Halloween favorites like haunted houses and pumpkin patches are well represented, Eventful also offers another feature: Users can see if their favorite music artists have special shows for the holiday.

For those on the go, there's Twitter. The popular mobile social networking site, offers the opportunity to take Halloween planning to a more interactive level this year. Its latest tracking feature allows users to receive alerts on their mobile phone whenever a specific keyword appears in a public update. Want to know what your peers are doing for October 31? Just track the term "Halloween," and follow the fun.

A New Way to Celebrate

Halloween revelers in search of candy, costumes, and décor for the holiday, can visit shopping sites like PriceGrabber and Kaboodle. Comparison shopping site PriceGrabber features a Halloween guide focused heavily on costumes. The listing also helps visitors choose the season's hottest costumes. This year's pick -- Harry Potter. And according to The New York Times, now-infamous Senator Larry Craig is doing very well in some quarters, too.

Social shopping site Kaboodle allows visitors to view product lists created by site members and profiles of anyone interested in the same items. Users can also create groups to discuss Halloween purchases and poll others to help decide what to buy. This is a particular boon for Halloween, for which "shoppers aren't typically searching for a particular item," says Manish Chandra, Kaboodle's CEO. The truly meticulous can even upload images of their costumes or decorations to help others decide which costumes or décor to buy.

Besides enabling visitors to plan for Halloween in traditional ways -- such as costuming, party planning, and haunted-house visits -- several Web companies offer media and applications commemorating the holiday. Mobile media company Thumbplay features Halloween promotions to "put some fright into your phone" on its Website. Visitors can find the theme song from "Halloween," clips from movies like "Bride of Frankenstein," as well as traditional scary sounds and images of ghosts and goblins.

Widgetbox offers Halloween-themed widgets for use on social network personal pages and profiles. The company has an "influx of 'merchandise' around the holidays," says Pam Webber, VP of marketing. Homepage promotion for Halloween content began on October 25, with the most popular widgets including countdowns to the holiday, Halloween-themed games, Halloween music players, and costume viewers. Costumes.com and Tenebre Records, which distributes Halloween and horror music, sponsor their own Halloween widgets as well.

Docstoc, a document-sharing site for business and legal documents, will publicly launch "around Halloween," according to CEO Jason Lawrence Nazar. Though still in beta, the site already offers printout masks for the late workers who'll be stuck in the office instead of out at parties.