
Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference - simonw
http://lanyrd.com/blog/2010/feeds/
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alain94040
Did you read this post-mortem from EventVue?
[http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/10/26/a-few-words-about-
eve...](http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/10/26/a-few-words-about-eventvue/)

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.

~~~
ericflo
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.

~~~
Swannie
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!

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

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johns
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.

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jasonmcalacanis
This site is brilliant.

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Lewisham
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/>

~~~
simonw
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
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.

~~~
simonw
Oh, like "Share this on Facebook" buttons? We'll take a look at that.

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bootload
_"... 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.

~~~
ericflo
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.

~~~
bootload
_"... 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.

~~~
simonw
So far we've been quite careful not to address that kind of use case - we
don't have comments on events, for example - partly because we don't want to
discourage conference organisers and speakers from using the site but also
because we want to avoid negativity becoming a core part of the community we
are building.

We'd rather make the great events obvious than highlight events that aren't so
good. People have a limited conference budget and we want to ensure they can
pick the best, most appropriate events for their interests.

~~~
bootload
_"... So far we've been quite careful not to address that kind of use case
..."_

I haven't used the service but I would have thought people do this anyway -
back channel chatter. SO the service is all open? You can't openly discuss how
good/bad a conference is to force conferences to improve? Either way it's a
great idea, keeping coding.

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turbodog
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...](http://www.allthingsrss.com/2010/12/07/track-conferences-socially-
with-lanyrd/)

------
thomas11
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.

~~~
simonw
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.

~~~
thomas11
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.

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

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

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wccrawford
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?

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

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julien
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!

~~~
simonw
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.

~~~
julien
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 :)

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

~~~
simonw
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.

~~~
j4mie
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.

~~~
Swannie
That's very true, but what are these "things"? They aren't just general
"events" a la Plancast. "meetup" has been taken by another brand in the same
space. Meeting sounds too... work like :-)

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

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

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

~~~
simonw
<http://lanyrd.com/colophon> has some details

~~~
muitocomplicado
That's great, thanks for sharing.

