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In praise of Lanyrd

I have been using Lanyrd pretty much since it exists (which isn’t that long), and I’m already convinced that it’s the awesomest possible tool for a multiclass speaker/organiser such as me. Therefore I wish to praise Lanyrd, and also make a few feature requests.

If you organise an event, especially a web conference somewhere in Europe, please add it to Lanyrd. It makes finding your event much easier.

Since writing my State of the Mobile Web 3 article, in which I deplored the complete lack of outreach from mobile companies to the web world, several mobile companies have contacted me to apologise and to ask me for a list of web conferences they could send their developer relations managers to.

I promised them to make a list, but didn’t actually do it. How would I find the right conferences? There’s so MUCH going on, and most of the right events don’t appear on my radar until too late. And even if I found them, I’d have to maintain some sort of master list somewhere, and these chores quickly become very annoying. So I didn’t really bother.

Until Lanyrd became good enough to use, that is. By now the database is well-stocked with conferences, and the awesome Tracking tool makes it extremely easy for me to create a list. Just by surfing Lanyrd for a while, now going for a keyword, then for a person I trust, and hitting Track whenever I find something interesting, I’ve been able to create a list of about 40 conferences that I can send out to all companies that asked for it (and a few that didn’t).

I will repeat this process every month or so, both for my clients and for myself. Personally I’m actively looking for European web conferences, possibly to speak at, but especially to find new exciting speakers for my own conferences. Lanyrd makes this quite easy.

So those are my use cases. Lanyrd is the almost perfect tool for them.

However, there are two features I’d really like to see:

1. I hardly use the formal homepage because it doesn’t stretch far enough into the future. In general I’m not interested in the conferences that will take place in the next 30 days or so. My traveling schedule is already fixed and I usually cannot afford to visit yet another conference, no matter how interesting it is.
   What I’d love to do, however, is go through conferences between two and eight months or so away: enough time to prepare for. So I’m hoping for a little “Next” button at the bottom of the homepage that shows me the next month’s worth of conferences. Thus I can browse the database by time, and that’ll help me a lot.
2. I’m hoping Lanyrd will implement a “future” page on which I see all future conferences I’m involved with or am tracking, whatever my exact status is. It’s this page that I want to send to my clients (and use myself). The current page insists on showing both past and future, and thus becomes too cluttered; especially when you track a lot of conferences.

I hope Simon and Natalie have time to implement these features in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately it seems that for much of the next year or so they’ll be stuck on the back of a camel performing obscure proto-Arabic rituals for political reasons.

We’ll see. But I’m taking a Pro account as soon as they actually exist.

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