Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is Lanyrd all about?

23rd July 2012

My answer to What is Lanyrd all about? on Quora

Lanyrd aims to help people get more out of conferences and professional events—by finding the right events to attend, meeting the right people there and catching up on slides, notes and video afterwards.

We’re a bit like Wikipedia in that we’re a community-driven site where any of our members can add events and improve existing listings—although event organisers now have the option to claim their event and change the editing permissions if they chose to.

Our event recommendations are based on Twitter—if you sign in with Twitter, we look at who you follow and show you events those people are speaking at, attending or tracking. We’ve found this provides extremely high quality recommendations as people tend to use Twitter to follow people they admire, often including prominent public speakers—without those people needing to follow them back in order to make the connection.

We also have mobile apps (iPhone and HTML5) which store information on events you are attending offline, so even if you are abroad without roaming data you can still see what’s going on. Event organisers can promote these apps to their attendees to keep them updated on the schedule, speakers and list of other attendees.