Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory
lanyrd.com
lanyrd.com
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 ;-)
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)
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.)
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).
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 ?
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.
Interestingly, there's also http://confindr.com which promises to be similar...
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!
It's nice being able to track a conference, but how about being able to track a topic too?
Nice job.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yes, I do. Do I do that after app has done something stupid under my account?
The bigger point for me is this:
Suppose I decide I just don't care anymore for Twitter (or, much more likely, Facebook) and kill my account. Later , I realize I can't sign on to SomeApp.com because I forgot I had it hooked to the service I just dropped.
I prefer apps that let me use them with no user account, offer more services if I provide a verified E-mail address, and offer even more if I opt in to sharing my Twitter/Facebook/whatever info.
If a site is giving people too much to think about when signing in it's just lazy UX design.
More importantly though, many speakers have Twitter accounts - which means we can create speaker profiles for people who have never signed in to the site. When we went live, we had close to a 1,000 profiles in our database - many of them people with thousands of followers. If /any/ of their followers signed in they would see that person's speaking appearance. It neatly solved the bootstrapping problem for us and meant that most of our first wave of users got at least a few recommendations.
I'm a big advocate of OpenID (see http://lanyrd.com/search/?q=openid&people=simonw ) so launching something that depends on one identity provider goes against my own principles to a certain extent, but the enormous benefits we got from bootstrapping off the Twitter ecosystem (and the reduced effort in engineering compared to trying to integrate with a bunch of other providers as well) was a worthwhile trade-off.