Our lexicon is now limited to the names of successful websites and companies:

- "Twitter" (n.) conversation

- "LinkedIn" (n.) professional development

- "IMDB" (n.) A large collection of cross-referenced, useful information. See also: Wikipedia.

We are now only waiting for the introduction of a few more pronouns and verbs before we hear constructions such as:

- ITS Facebook MeetsUp Yelp Googles Netflix

- Where's the Milk YCombinator?

Why all the negativity here? This is a tale of a couple of developers who have created a really interesting and useful product that has already built up a big community.

Surely, this is something we should be celebrating, rather than nitpicking minor issues with the use of particular company names in the article. Well done Simon and Nat!

Really good article this one - Wade's interview with us was very thorough.

The title of this article reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk's famous talk where he says: "Stop saying 'Well, we're the Facebook plus Digg minus Flickr and del.icio.us on the flip side.' That's horse sh1t. Do what you're about, please"

Kinda ridiculous that you can only log in using Twitter. Talk about unnecessarily high platform dependency.

We do plan to move beyond Twitter eventually, but it's actually been incredibly important in getting the site off the ground. We're not just using Twitter for login, we're using it as an external identity provider.

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.

Very interesting insight - could you have gotten around the chicken-and-egg problem pre-twitter? What would your approach have been?

I honestly don't think we could have - other sites had attempted to do this kind of thing for conferences in the past and hadn't really taken off, and I think the lack of a pre-existing social graph was a big factor. The fact that Twitter already had a social graph and a heavy focus on event activity was one of the inspirations for starting the site.

Seriously -- I was going to recommend this to some colleagues , but twitter-only totally nerfs it.

Lanyrd solves a real-world problem and Twitter is a great choice of enabling platform. Why the short-sighted critique? I'm appalled at the response that Simon and Nat have received on this site, given that they've taken the time to involve themselves in this community.

This is the worst title / description of a company I have ever heard. It's confounding to try and imagine the fusion of Twitter, LinkedIn, and IMDB - far simpler to just describe the product.

tl;dr: It lists conference speakers and their decks, organized around Twitter handles.

That was helpful. Thank you. I may actually use their service now that I understand it's usefulness.

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

Excellent article and a Lanyrd is a great site. So totally agree with everything Wade says !

Does not reflect well on a nascent company that presumably is not self-powering as yet.

We can tell that you posted this comment within a minute of creating your HN account and would appreciate it if you were up-front about your connections to Lanyrd.

Unbeknownst to us, this appears to be Nat's dad. Nice to have some unsolicited support from family members :)

The article (and idea) intrigued me enough that I checked lanyrd.com out... but the visual design was far too cluttered. The thumbnails threw me off. Hope it improves...

Did you explore beyond our homepage?