

Lanyrd (YC W11): It's Twitter meets LinkedIn meets IMDB for conferences - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/05/12/lanyrd-twitter-meets-linkedin-meets-imdb-for-the-conference-circuit/

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asolove
Our lexicon is now limited to the names of successful websites and companies:

\- "Twitter" (n.) conversation

\- "LinkedIn" (n.) professional development

\- "IMDB" (n.) A large collection of cross-referenced, useful information. See
also: Wikipedia.

We are now only waiting for the introduction of a few more pronouns and verbs
before we hear constructions such as:

\- ITS Facebook MeetsUp Yelp Googles Netflix

\- Where's the Milk YCombinator?

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alexkearns
Why all the negativity here? This is a tale of a couple of developers who have
created a really interesting and useful product that has already built up a
big community.

Surely, this is something we should be celebrating, rather than nitpicking
minor issues with the use of particular company names in the article. Well
done Simon and Nat!

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simonw
Really good article this one - Wade's interview with us was very thorough.

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firefoxman1
The title of this article reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk's famous talk where he
says: "Stop saying 'Well, we're the Facebook plus Digg minus Flickr and
del.icio.us on the flip side.' That's horse sh1t. Do what you're about,
please"

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arkitaip
Kinda ridiculous that you can only log in using Twitter. Talk about
unnecessarily high platform dependency.

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simonw
We do plan to move beyond Twitter eventually, but it's actually been
incredibly important in getting the site off the ground. We're not just using
Twitter for login, we're using it as an external identity provider.

For example, if @barackobama is speaking at a conference you can add him to
that event on Lanyrd. He gets an unclaimed profile page on the site (which he
can sign in to claim later) but more importantly anyone who follows him on
Twitter gets that event recommended to them when they sign in.

When we launched the site, we had over 500 speaker profiles despite just two
of us populating the data. Since those speakers tended to have large numbers
of followers, there was a high chance that our first users who signed in would
see at least a few event recommendations. This solved the bootstrapping
challenge faced by any new piece of social software.

The same trick wouldn't work nearly as well with LinkedIn and Facebook, for
two reasons.

Firstly, both of those networks feature two-way relationships where the other
party has to approve your connection. This makes it harder to follow people
who you admire but who don't know you in return - exactly the kind of people
you might want to see speak at an event.

Secondly, the privacy expectations for those networks are completely
different. The Twitter ecosystem is comfortable with the idea of sites
creating profiles based on their Twitter identity (see twittercounter, klout
and hundreds of others) without them first having interacted with the site. If
we did that against LinkedIn or Facebook accounts the response would be very
different.

On top of that, Twitter is absolutely the social network most associated with
our kinds of events. Conference backchannels happen on Twitter, and many
speakers include their Twitter name on the first slides in their
presentations. It's a very good fit.

So while we plan to move beyond Twitter at some point, so far it has served us
extremely well.

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sgrove
Very interesting insight - could you have gotten around the chicken-and-egg
problem pre-twitter? What would your approach have been?

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simonw
I honestly don't think we could have - other sites had attempted to do this
kind of thing for conferences in the past and hadn't really taken off, and I
think the lack of a pre-existing social graph was a big factor. The fact that
Twitter already had a social graph and a heavy focus on event activity was one
of the inspirations for starting the site.

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ChrisBeach
Lanyrd solves a real-world problem and Twitter is a great choice of enabling
platform. Why the short-sighted critique? I'm appalled at the response that
Simon and Nat have received on this site, given that they've taken the time to
involve themselves in this community.

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sawyer
This is the worst title / description of a company I have ever heard. It's
confounding to try and imagine the fusion of Twitter, LinkedIn, and IMDB - far
simpler to just describe the product.

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ryanlchan
tl;dr: It lists conference speakers and their decks, organized around Twitter
handles.

~~~
vnchr
That was helpful. Thank you. I may actually use their service now that I
understand it's usefulness.

Anyone care to comment on the experience of using it while not being a
conference frequenter?

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mungo
Excellent article and a Lanyrd is a great site. So totally agree with
everything Wade says !

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bxr
We can tell that you posted this comment within a minute of creating your HN
account and would appreciate it if you were up-front about your connections to
Lanyrd.

~~~
simonw
Unbeknownst to us, this appears to be Nat's dad. Nice to have some unsolicited
support from family members :)

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bloggergirl
The article (and idea) intrigued me enough that I checked lanyrd.com out...
but the visual design was far too cluttered. The thumbnails threw me off. Hope
it improves...

~~~
simonw
Did you explore beyond our homepage?

