Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

by simonw • 16 years ago

71 38 16 years ago

thehodge• 16 years ago

Having got to play with the site yesterday, I was impressed that one of MY conferences was already listed with speakers, attendees and myself listed as an editor, its a really nice interface which impressed me straight off.

The only thing I would suggest would be also having facebook connect or whatever its called this week as even though we are a web conference, only 60% of our audience has a twitter account however most of them have a facebook account (with mostly the same friends)

robertg2• 16 years ago

I agree. Also, I'm hesitant to log in from work since we block twitter here and I don't want to hit the web filter.

friism• 16 years ago

I would recommend LinkedIn over Facebook, people will likely want to use their professional profiles for attending conferences.

apgwoz• 16 years ago

Wasn't able to sign in with twitter--got a 404. If you can become the largest directory of conferences, and get people to post slides and things, so they're all in one spot, I think it's a no-brainer.

Interestingly, there's also http://confindr.com which promises to be similar...

webology• 16 years ago

I had the same 404 but they fixed it very quickly. Adding a new conference was extremely easy which impressed me.

robertg2• 16 years ago

I like it. Nice layout and I like the fact that you can search/browse conferences without having to log in.

Nice job.

madewulf• 16 years ago

I really like the fact that you did not try to create yet another social network and just exploited the existing social graph of twitter to make the connections. I totally agree with thehodge about the fact that a natural extension would be to use also the facebook social graph to offer a beter ux.

That said, the site seems a bit too dependent on twitter. I just added an "unlinked person", meaning somebody without twitter account and it seems impossible to add a picture or an url for those persons.

The UI is very nice, except maybe for the intrusive tag at the top left. It is too big IMHO

Finally, as this is a "startup review", is assume you wish to make money with this. Do you plan to do it with referees fees from Amazon for the sales of book ?

paulsmith2• 16 years ago

The dashboard view which is a list of upcoming conferences that you and/or your friends (as determined by your Twitter account) are speaking at or tracking is hugely valuable and great for discovery -- as in, hey, there's a conference I didn't know about but a bunch of my friends are attending, I should check it out.

It would be nice to see this same association of my friends to conferences in the search result views as well.

Great start, Simon & Nat! (Who, incidentally, are touring the world on an extended honeymoon, so extra kudos for launching a new startup together from Gibraltar or Casablanca or wherever you are logging in from ;-)

simonw5• 16 years ago

Thanks - we're in Casablanca. Only downside is our internet went down for four hours this afternoon, so I missed this entire discussion!

paulsmith2• 16 years ago

Lucky guess on my part :)

ibrow• 16 years ago

First impressions are that it is really clean and simple to use. I agree with others that you should have a facebook login as well as twitter. One minor thing I noticed is that if you do a search the conference results aren't in date order. For example, if you search for "Berlin" the date order goes 2010, 2007, 2010 which, IMO, is a bit counter intuitive. Apart from that, all good so far.

Infomus• 16 years ago

I really like the idea. I would also be interested in your advertising program. I have a promotional product eCommerce company that sells Lanyards and conference items.

Everything seems to work great.. I would not mind seeing a short description about the event under the URL of the conference site. --- Looks Great!

Throlkim• 16 years ago

I really like it - the interface is very clean and exactly what I was expecting (which is good)!

It's nice being able to track a conference, but how about being able to track a topic too?

simonw5• 16 years ago

We're planning the ability to track topics, locations and conference series - but we'll need to build some sort of activity stream first so that tracking actually does something useful.

mixman• 16 years ago

How to build the location database used for adding a conference location? It seems quite comprehensive. Where do startups get this data?

wallflower• 16 years ago

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98449/how-to-convert-an-a...

http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-US-1.00/US/Import.p...

jdunck• 16 years ago

The colophon http://lanyrd.com/colophon/ says GeoPlanet: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/

trevorturk• 16 years ago

Awesome. I don't see any way for me to get a tweet/email/something to let me know when new stuff is added. That kind of thing would be nice, because I'm sure I won't remember to go back to the site.

jamesbritt4• 16 years ago

Are standalone user/password systems so hard to add and get right? (I'm serious about this; it seems like a solved problem, yet there also seems to be a number of sites that punt on that, and want me to couple their site with my account on some other site, which I really do not want to do as a default.)

Maybe people need throwaway Twitter accounts, like there is for E-mail.

steveklabnik4• 16 years ago

It's not hard to add, but it's so much more useful to me to not make Yet Another Account.

jamesbritt4• 16 years ago

Then it's a matter of picking the audience you want for an app, knowing you'll be losing potential users.

simonw5• 16 years ago

We're dependent on Twitter for two reasons. Firstly, people who go to conferences (at least web/tech conferences) tweet a lot, and a big part of what we're planning in the future involves capturing tweets made throughout and event and making them easier to browse / filter through. Sign in with Twitter, say you're attending X and we can capture your tweets from the start to the finish of the event.

More importantly though, many speakers have Twitter accounts - which means we can create speaker profiles for people who have never signed in to the site. When we went live, we had close to a 1,000 profiles in our database - many of them people with thousands of followers. If /any/ of their followers signed in they would see that person's speaking appearance. It neatly solved the bootstrapping problem for us and meant that most of our first wave of users got at least a few recommendations.

I'm a big advocate of OpenID (see http://lanyrd.com/search/?q=openid&people=simonw ) so launching something that depends on one identity provider goes against my own principles to a certain extent, but the enormous benefits we got from bootstrapping off the Twitter ecosystem (and the reduced effort in engineering compared to trying to integrate with a bunch of other providers as well) was a worthwhile trade-off.

camworld• 16 years ago

I co-founded http://confabb.com several years back (circa 2006). It never really got off the ground but the site is still up and functional. I'm not involved with the site anymore.

tim_church• 16 years ago

I am actually working on a very similar site. Glad to see that others see the same need for this. Nicely executed.

johns• 16 years ago

I like it. Since I go to conferences basically for a living, I will definitely be using it a lot. Some kind of integration with Plancast (there's already some overlap, ideally for me I'd like to see them merged) would be nice.

And some UX feedback:

- Place selection requires full state name (Austin, TX didn't work) which was unexpected

- Picking a lanyrd URL for the event I added seemed like an unnecessary step. Just pick the best one!

- One-click track or attend option in dashboard and all conferences list

Overall, very well done. Looking forward to using it regularly.

benwerd• 16 years ago

This is the most useful approach to event discovery since Upcoming. I was thrilled to see it in my Twitter list earlier, and I'm thrilled about the amount of attention it's getting.

I have just one request: feeds. Everywhere. I'd love to subscribe to a user, and have new events they're attending show up in my reader - similarly, I'd love to subscribe to a place.

The Twitter integration really works for me as opposed to Facebook; the former tends to be professional connections, while the latter is friends. However, I understand that others might feel differently. (OpenID would obviously also be brilliant, with some social graph discovery etc, but I imagine you've already thought about that.)

samps• 16 years ago

I realize this might not be your goal, but any chance you would consider targeting some features toward academics? Academic conferences are horrible to keep track of, and this seems like it might almost be a great solution.

The missing pieces, as I see them, include more structured programs (i.e., the sessions have titles; the speakers are listed even if they're not on Lanyrd or even Twitter) and the ability to follow series of conferences (i.e., I want to know what happens at OOPSLA every year, not just once).

simonw5• 16 years ago

We're absolutely interested in solving that kind of problem. We have upcoming support for sessions and schedules which should help out there (preview at http://lanyrd.com/2009/full-frontal/schedule/ - regular users can't add those yet though). We're also going to add support for CfPs and other deadlines related to conferences - at which point "tracking" a conference will actually be useful.

vlucas• 16 years ago

Cool. Looks like http://keynot.es is doing the same thing as well.

Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

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