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Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

lanyrd.com

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Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#31

Post by steveklabnik »

jamesbritt wrote: post #28
steveklabnik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers you about using your Twitter or Facebook account? Just wondering, since I've considered relying only on Facebook Connect/Twitter for projects in the future.

Matters of trust and privacy. I want to be able to change/cancel services without wondering if there's some forgotten dependency. 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.…

Gotcha. You do know that with Twitter, you can go in and specifically revoke an app's access to your account?

> 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.

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#32

Post by samps »

I realize this might not be your goal, but any chance you would consider targeting some features toward academics? Academic conferences are horrible to keep track of, and this seems like it might almost be a great solution.

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).

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#33

Post by icey »

steveklabnik wrote: post #31
jamesbritt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matters of trust and privacy. I want to be able to change/cancel services without wondering if there's some forgotten dependency. 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.…

Gotcha. You do know that with Twitter, you can go in and specifically revoke an app's access to your account? > 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 techni…

It's crazy; just about every web application in existence requires a login and this still isn't a solved problem. I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#34

Post by steveklabnik »

icey wrote: post #33
steveklabnik wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha. You do know that with Twitter, you can go in and specifically revoke an app's access to your account? > 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 techni…

It's crazy; just about every web application in existence requires a login and this still isn't a solved problem. I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.

> I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.

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.

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#35

Post by icey »

steveklabnik wrote: post #34
icey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy; just about every web application in existence requires a login and this still isn't a solved problem. I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction.

> I wonder why Clickpass hasn't gotten more traction. 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.

Sorry, http://www.clickpass.com/

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.

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#36

Post by simonw »

paulsmith wrote: post #8

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…

Thanks - we're in Casablanca. Only downside is our internet went down for four hours this afternoon, so I missed this entire discussion!

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#37

Post by paulsmith »

simonw wrote: post #36
paulsmith wrote: post #8

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…

Thanks - we're in Casablanca. Only downside is our internet went down for four hours this afternoon, so I missed this entire discussion!

Lucky guess on my part :)

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#38

Post by simonw »

paulsmith wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - we're in Casablanca. Only downside is our internet went down for four hours this afternoon, so I missed this entire discussion!

Lucky guess on my part :)

Hah - and we were in Gibraltar a few weeks ago :)

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#39

Post by simonw »

samps wrote: post #32

I realize this might not be your goal, but any chance you would consider targeting some features toward academics? Academic conferences are horrible to keep track of, and this seems like it might almost be a great solution. 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 follo…

We're absolutely interested in solving that kind of problem. We have upcoming support for sessions and schedules which should help out there (preview at http://lanyrd.com/2009/full-frontal/schedule/ - regular users can't add those yet though). We're also going to add support for CfPs and other deadlines related to conferences - at which point "tracking" a conference will actually be useful.

Re: Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory

#40

Post by simonw »

jamesbritt wrote: post #17

Sign in with Twitter? Seriously? 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.

We're dependent on Twitter for two reasons. Firstly, people who go to conferences (at least web/tech conferences) tweet a lot, and a big part of what we're planning in the future involves capturing tweets made throughout and event and making them easier to browse / filter through. Sign in with Twitter, say you're attending X and we can capture your tweets from the start to the finish of the event.

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.

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