Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

http://lanyrd.com/blog/2010/feeds/

by simonw • 16 years ago

133 43 16 years ago

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

I think this is pretty neat, and I do like the Twitter integration a lot. I'd also like to see Facebook integration, so people can announce their attendance. Also adding the event to TripIt might also be useful.

Here's one I just set up in < 2 minutes:

http://lanyrd.com/2011/gas/

simonw11• 16 years ago

We're thinking pretty hard about Facebook and LinkedIn integration.

The problem is that we're not just using Twitter for sign-in and as a source of friends: we're also using it as a conference speaker identity directory. Lanyrd lets you list the speakers for a conference, e.g. "@timbray is speaking at AndroidCon" - without those people necessarily having signed up for accounts on the site. Since speakers often have large Twitter followings, this makes it much more likely that a user signing in for the first time will get at least a few conference suggestions.

This complicates things a bit when we start involving other identity providers, since we then have to start tracking equivalent accounts on multiple services (Tim Bray on LinkedIn = TimBray on Facebook = @timbray on Twitter). Not impossible, but fiddly enough that we're sticking with Twitter for the moment.

saurik• 16 years ago

I don't think Lewisham meant "for authentication". Once logged in with Twitter, you might still want to easily send a message to your Facebook account. One might also imagine the conference could have an associated Facebook event. Nome of this would require dropping the current "use Twitter as primary login" concept you are describing.

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

I wasn't necessarily saying Facebook should be used as the identity mechanism, just a Facebook share button so people could put it on their News Feed.

julien2• 16 years ago

Of course, making those feeds PubSubHubbub would be ideal, so that my dear reader wouldn't have to poll them all the time =) And since now PubSubHubbub is content agnostic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981234), it would work for the calendar feeds too!

simonw11• 16 years ago

I did think about PubSubHubbub for this, but implementing pings was a bit fiddly - a conference appears on the django-in-london feed only after the django tag has been added for example, but that also implies it appearing in the django-in-uk feed. Since it doesn't really matter if you hear about a new conference within seconds, minutes, hours or even days I decided it wasn't worth doing PubSubHubbub for the initial launch of this feature.

julien2• 16 years ago

Yup... I agree with the cause : " it doesn't really matter if you hear about a new conference within seconds, minutes, hours or even days", but not with the consequence! PubSubHubbub is not about time, but about push (timeliness is a consequence). By having a push mechanism, you just allow for updates to propagate to any kind of application, rather than have them all poll the resources endlessly, wasting their resources, your ressources and eventually just making it not worth. You want other to consume your content. Make their life easier :)

jasonmcalacanis• 16 years ago

This site is brilliant.

gojomo• 16 years ago

With that name and tagline, I first thought this was going to be resources (like printable templates) for creating counterfeit conference badges. Badgester/Wikibadges.

simonw11• 16 years ago

We're a bit worried about our "the social conference directory" tagline, since we've had a few people think the site is only for social media conferences.

Swannie6• 16 years ago

the connected conference directory?

turbodog2• 16 years ago

"the conference directory goes social"

j4mie• 16 years ago

Lots of people are using Lanyrd for group meetings, social events, and all sorts of things that aren't conferences (eg http://lanyrd.com/2010/brightonpy-october/skgp/ ). It might be worth rethinking the tagline to make it more friendly to this kind of thing - assuming it's something you want to encourage.

bootload3• 16 years ago

"... we were fed up of missing out on great conferences because we didn't hear about them in time. .."

What else besides time determines your likeliness to attend a conference? The might/might-not attend space is multi-dimensional.

You might also not attend because it is a long way away, too expensive, the attendees are stupid and nobody I know is attending and there are few sessions you like. I do like these kinds of services because the tipping point to going to a conference might consist of more than just the time, location and price.

ericflo2• 16 years ago

Not sure what you're getting at here--Lanyrd lets you see where it is, who's attending (and which of those are your friends), the planned sessions, and the date/time.

bootload3• 16 years ago

"... who's attending (and which of those are your friends), the planned sessions, and the date/time. ..."

Didn't see that. I was trying to think of how the service could supply you with contrary data - reasons to not attend. If I want to try a new restaurant, I'll check for balanced critical reviews not just the facts.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

I was just asking for this earlier! Thanks!

Can you subscribe to multiple topics in 1 feed? Or do you have umbrella topics like 'programming' that would cover all programming languages?

simonw11• 16 years ago

Not yet, but we have a bunch of improvements planned that would help address that use-case.

Swannie6• 16 years ago

You could build something like that with YQL?

DTrejo• 16 years ago

I wish I could sign up for email updates, instead of dealing with feeds.

simonw11• 16 years ago

I hear you. Feeds are a lot quicker to implement as a first step.

Swannie6• 16 years ago

I'm still slightly surpised there has not been an optional "email address" field in the profile page, in preparation for the day this comes!

alain94040• 16 years ago

Did you read this post-mortem from EventVue? http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/10/26/a-few-words-about-eve...

It was on HN last week. The funny thing is, showing who is coming to a conference actually hurt their client! Because people tend to register so late... So double check your claims that you know who is coming.

Swannie6• 16 years ago

I just read this and the post-mortem.

Whether by luck, or more likely experience, Lanyrd ventured into the event space quite differently from EventVue and all of the companies listed in the article. The emphasis on crowdsourcing to build up the database is, as far as I can tell, unique.

Most of the companies listed in the article want to build a private, ring fenced social network for each client & all the tools. This only really works if you already have an existing network, with incentives other than just the conference. For example the telecoms world has the TMForum, and their site is a private social network. Works for them. O'Reilly have their own tool too, as a big conference host, with lots of events and followers (&authors).

The value in lanyrd, to date, is not trying to enter that space. Personally I'm finding interesting content from events I would have loved to go to, but did not, mainly because a) I didn't know they existed or b) my interests were not in that space at the time of the conference! There are literally dozens of interesting use-cases which could or could not be monetized.

There are some great ideas in that article for Lanyrd to look into in terms of revenue generation though, especially with respect to tracking user referals/sign up flow.

ericflo2• 16 years ago

I think Lanyrd's "tracking" feature solves this, because it shows which of your friends are interested in the conference right alongside those who are slated to attend and/or speak.

Swannie6• 16 years ago

It goes some way of solving that issue yes. Ultimately though the problem of "few people registered" is poor sales, and to a degree marketing, by that individual conference.

There is a reason why conferences (as opposed to trade show events) heavily discount early-bird tickets. Cashflow and the ability to market more heavily. Lanyrd makes marketing easier, down to the organiser (and ticket agent) to make sales work well!

simonw11• 16 years ago

Ouch, HN drives a bit more traffic than I was expecting - site is flaky at the moment, sorry about that.

simonw11• 16 years ago

I upgraded to a larger RDS instance and we're running fine again now.

muitocomplicado2• 16 years ago

It would be cool if you could tell us more about the structure behind the website.

turbodog2• 16 years ago

Have you considered letting users subscribe to a list of topics, locations, etc. within Lanyrd and aggregating that into one feed?

update: wrote a blog entry about Lanyard with my thoughts http://www.allthingsrss.com/2010/12/07/track-conferences-soc...

thomas112• 16 years ago

If only conference prices weren't so depressingly high. I discovered three interesting ones in a reasonable distance through Lanyrd---awesome site!---but don't want to pay 1000+.

The expense could easily pay for itself through networking, as you make new contacts and find new opportunities, but if you don't know the conference, that's pretty unsure.

simonw11• 16 years ago

Two solutions: 1) Be a speaker, and 2) Go to BarCamps and Unconferences instead. I've been to a number of free BarCamps which have competed extremely well with expensive events in terms of both networking and quality of talks.

thomas112• 16 years ago

Thanks, I'll look into the BarCamps once again, had kinda forgotten about them. The selection in Switzerland is not that big.

I've started speaking at smaller Open Source conferences this year, and hope to expand that. It's a great experience.

jamesjyu• 16 years ago

Am I the only one that finds most conferences to be a waste of time?

bmcmanus• 16 years ago

Agreed. Small, focused local meetups, however, I've found useful much more frequently and should not be lumped together with said conferences.

johns• 16 years ago

A lot of conferences are poorly run and are a waste of time. The conferences I find that I enjoy the most (and I go to a lot by way of my job) are the ones where the topic attracts the kind of people I find interesting. The people are always more valuable than the content. I have yet to attend a conference I've enjoyed where this wasn't the case.

It also depends a lot on where you are with your career. If you're new to things, meeting new people and learning new things will have more appeal to you. If you've got an established network and aren't in a hardcore learning mode, you'll probably be disappointed by most of them.

tartley• 16 years ago

Yeah, most are, but the good ones are amazing. As a for instance, I spent years going to large corporate oriented industry conferences, and hating them. Last few years, I've discovered the smaller, community run Python conferences, which have had a transformational effect on myself and my understanding and my career.

That's why something like Lanyrd is great, for helping you find those small events which are full of smart passionate people doing cool things.

Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

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