Lanyrd (YC W11): It's Twitter meets LinkedIn meets IMDB for conferences

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.

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