Lanyrd, the Social Conference Directory

I’m a blogger who usually needs quite some time to write blog posts. However, I just learned about a new tool that I need not describe in detail. Firstly, because Heidi Allen just described the tool in a blog post here. Secondly, because the tool is so intuitive and easy.

I’m talking about Lanyrd, a directory of geeky events, technical conferences and social meetings.

It is really so simple and effective. Please follow me.

You go to http://lanyrd.com/, connect via OAuth to Twitter and before you can count to 3, Lanyrd shows you the conferences your friends on Twitter are going to as a speaker (blue border) or an attendee. You can also see friends who keep track of the conference (vague).

Unfortunately purely scientific or medical conferences are not included, but who knows what Lanyrd is up to.

You can track the conferences by subscribing in iCal / Outlook. It is also easy to add conferences.

I might go to Medicine 2.0, but I didn’t make up my mind yet. If I click on the link I see the following page:

You can click on “Attend” or on “Track” if this applies. Furthermore you get an overview of the conference: the location, the link to the website, the Twitter account, the hashtag used in tweets (#med2) and of the speakers.

Oh …. there are none yet, so I added a few.

It is easy to do, people who have never logged into the site can also be added. However, if helps to know the exact twitter name, if many people on Twitter share the same name (else you have to check all the profiles generated with Twitter search).

Lanyrd is the baby of the recently married couple Simon Willison and Natalie Downe. And as it goes with babies, they grow up.

What can we expect the next few years?

Simon in the Guardian:

“We have lots of exciting plans for Lanyrd’s future. One of the things we’re very keen on is gathering information on past conferences – speaker slides, videos, audio recordings and write-ups. In five years’ time, we hope we’ll have the best collection of conference coverage possible.”

Credits to Heidi Allen (@dreamingspires) and Anne Marie Cunningham (@amcunningham) who discussed Lanyrd on Twitter. As said, Heidi wrote a post on Lanyrd, and Anne Marie wrote a short blogpost at Wishful Thinking in Medical Education on the need to find list of upcoming medical or health conferences- and the hashtags that would be used to cover them on twitter. The Solution as it appeared was Lanyrd (at least for some of the conferences).

Related Articles

• Lanyrd (lockergnome.com)
• Elevator Pitch: Lanyrd makes conferences social, via Twitter (guardian.co.uk)
• We added conference coverage to Lanyrd.com, now collecting video/audio/slides/.. (lanyrd.com)
• Cool Websites and Tools [October 18th] (makeuseof.com)