

 Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory - simonw
http://lanyrd.com/?

======
paulsmith
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 ;-)

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

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paulsmith
Lucky guess on my part :)

~~~
simonw
Hah - and we were in Gibraltar a few weeks ago :)

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thehodge
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)

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

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benwerd
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.)

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samps
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).

~~~
simonw
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.

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madewulf
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 ?

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camworld
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.

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johns
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.

------
ibrow
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.

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

~~~
wallflower
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98449/how-to-convert-
an-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98449/how-to-convert-an-address-
to-a-latitude-longitude)

[http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-
US-1.00/US/Import.p...](http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-
US-1.00/US/Import.pm)

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

------
Infomus
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!

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

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

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trevorturk
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.

------
Throlkim
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?

~~~
simonw
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.

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

Nice job.

------
jamesbritt
Sign in with Twitter? Seriously?

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.

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

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

~~~
steveklabnik
What bothers you about using your Twitter or Facebook account? Just wondering,
since I've considered relying only on Facebook Connect/Twitter for projects in
the future.

~~~
jamesbritt
Matters of trust and privacy. I want to be able to change/cancel services
without wondering if there's some forgotten dependency.

Often I try something out first to see if it's worth the trouble. I don't want
to give out some other account info for something I may not even be bothered
using.

I can see offering, as an option, the use of twitter/facebook/gmail whatever,
but not to the exclusion of a standalone account. Especially since, as you
say, it's easy to add.

~~~
steveklabnik
Gotcha. You do know that with Twitter, you can go in and specifically revoke
an app's access to your account?

> Often I try something out first to see if it's worth the trouble.

It's really interesting that we use the same logic to justify totally
different outcomes.

> but not to the exclusion of a standalone account.

To provide some context, I'd like to keep things as simple as possible, in
general. Even with technical people, it's easy to get confused with multiple
login options. Every time I go to Quora, something in my brain remembers that
I used Facebook to sign up, so I click that button on the home page, and get a
message about how I'm already signed up, I need to actually log in with my
email/password via the other form. Every time.

~~~
icey
It's crazy; just about every web application in existence requires a login and
this still isn't a solved problem. I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more
traction.

~~~
steveklabnik
> I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.

Clickpass? (of course, I can Google. Just making a point. Seems cool, though.)

I'd say OpenId was the most recent attempt at making this really work, and
failed.

~~~
icey
Sorry, <http://www.clickpass.com/>

Although, I suppose that's indicative of part of Clickpass' adoption problem -
their functionality is pretty prominent right on the HN login / signup page
and many people here still don't know who they are.

