Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

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)

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...

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 ?

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 ;-)

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.