Live data from Hacker News

Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

lanyrd.com

1–10 of 44 posts

Re: Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

#4
post #2

I think this is pretty neat, and I do like the Twitter integration a lot. I'd also like to see Facebook integration, so people can announce their attendance. Also adding the event to TripIt might also be useful. Here's one I just set up in http://lanyrd.com/2011/gas/

We're thinking pretty hard about Facebook and LinkedIn integration.

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.

Re: Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

#6
post #3

Of course, making those feeds PubSubHubbub would be ideal, so that my dear reader wouldn't have to poll them all the time =) And since now PubSubHubbub is content agnostic ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981234 ), it would work for the calendar feeds too!

I did think about PubSubHubbub for this, but implementing pings was a bit fiddly - a conference appears on the django-in-london feed only after the django tag has been added for example, but that also implies it appearing in the django-in-uk feed. Since it doesn't really matter if you hear about a new conference within seconds, minutes, hours or even days I decided it wasn't worth doing PubSubHubbub for the initial launch of this feature.

Re: Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

#7
post #6
post #3

Of course, making those feeds PubSubHubbub would be ideal, so that my dear reader wouldn't have to poll them all the time =) And since now PubSubHubbub is content agnostic ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981234 ), it would work for the calendar feeds too!

I did think about PubSubHubbub for this, but implementing pings was a bit fiddly - a conference appears on the django-in-london feed only after the django tag has been added for example, but that also implies it appearing in the django-in-uk feed. Since it doesn't really matter if you hear about a new conference within seconds, minutes, hours or even days I decided it wasn't worth doing PubSubHubbub for the initial l…

Yup... I agree with the cause : " it doesn't really matter if you hear about a new conference within seconds, minutes, hours or even days", but not with the consequence! PubSubHubbub is not about time, but about push (timeliness is a consequence). By having a push mechanism, you just allow for updates to propagate to any kind of application, rather than have them all poll the resources endlessly, wasting their resources, your ressources and eventually just making it not worth. You want other to consume your content. Make their life easier :)

Re: Lanyrd feeds: never miss out on a conference

#9
"... we were fed up of missing out on great conferences because we didn't hear about them in time. .."

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.

Post reply on HN