Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference
lanyrd.com
lanyrd.com
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.
Whether by luck, or more likely experience, Lanyrd ventured into the event space quite differently from EventVue and all of the companies listed in the article. The emphasis on crowdsourcing to build up the database is, as far as I can tell, unique.
Most of the companies listed in the article want to build a private, ring fenced social network for each client & all the tools. This only really works if you already have an existing network, with incentives other than just the conference. For example the telecoms world has the TMForum, and their site is a private social network. Works for them. O'Reilly have their own tool too, as a big conference host, with lots of events and followers (&authors).
The value in lanyrd, to date, is not trying to enter that space. Personally I'm finding interesting content from events I would have loved to go to, but did not, mainly because a) I didn't know they existed or b) my interests were not in that space at the time of the conference! There are literally dozens of interesting use-cases which could or could not be monetized.
There are some great ideas in that article for Lanyrd to look into in terms of revenue generation though, especially with respect to tracking user referals/sign up flow.
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!
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.
That's why something like Lanyrd is great, for helping you find those small events which are full of smart passionate people doing cool things.
Here's one I just set up in < 2 minutes:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
update: wrote a blog entry about Lanyard with my thoughts http://www.allthingsrss.com/2010/12/07/track-conferences-soc...
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.
I've started speaking at smaller Open Source conferences this year, and hope to expand that. It's a great experience.
Can you subscribe to multiple topics in 1 feed? Or do you have umbrella topics like 'programming' that would cover all programming languages?