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

Lanyrd.com

users/search.json

Lanyrd.com

Under the hood

Lanyrd.com

Lanyrd.com

Secret weapon #1: Redis

Lanyrd.com

Secret weapon #2: Solr

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Redis set intersection

Lanyrd.com

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

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