Simon Willison @simonw
Lanyrd.comHow we bootstrapped Lanyrd
using Twitter’s social graph
Lanyrd.com
Definitive databaseof professional events
and speakers
Lanyrd.com
Social event recommendationComprehensive speaker profiles
Archive of slides, notes and video
Definitive databaseof professional events
and speakers
Lanyrd.com
Demo
Lanyrd.com
Why does it work?•The right crowdsourcing incentives
•Wiki-style shared ownership
•The parts support the whole
•Twitter!
Lanyrd.com
Why Twitter?•It’s where the event discussion happens
•Speakers promote their Twitter accounts
•Follow beats Friend for recommendations
•Culturally amenable to public profiles
Lanyrd.com
Bootstrapping•Classic social software challenge
•Our secret weapon: the speakers!
•Twitter accounts are public identifiers
•(and speakers have lots of followers)
•500 profiles before launching our beta
Lanyrd.com
More demos
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Key Twitter APIs
Lanyrd.com
friends/ids.json[43593, 19972629, 778518, 1249881, 70478255, 3829151, 350373, 12161, 13141, 751953, 22785347, 2633711, 14835908, 143883, 14159138, 11963132, 14917418, 15732699, 756475, ...]
Lanyrd.com
friendships/create
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users/search.json
Lanyrd.com
Under the hood
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Lanyrd.com
Secret weapon #1: Redis
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Secret weapon #2: Solr
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Redis set intersection
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Calendar•Pull user’s friends/ids.json
•Cache for ten hours
•Store in Redis
•Solr search: attendees:(34722 OR 1312313 OR...
Lanyrd.com
Pros and cons
Lanyrd.com
Pros•One-click signup
•Naturally viral
•Instant personalisation
•Pre-created profiles, ready to be claimed
•APIs are pleasant to work with
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Cons •One big, scary dependency
•No namespace control
•Hard to optimise, as no local graph copy
•Some users follow/are-followed a LOT
•OAuth permissions...
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Permissions hell
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Tweet this:@lanyrd attending
#londonweblanyrd.com/adthp