Lanyrd

» see lanyrd.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lanyrd's whole premise was that you already knew which conferences mattered, because you followed the people who spoke at them. The circuit it indexed was the anglophone web industry, and that circuit met in London and in Austin. From Ankara it was a reading list rather than a calendar. I knew a lot of those names from their blogs, which is not at all the same as being in the room, and Lanyrd was a tool built for people who were going to be in the room.

Simon Willison and Natalie Downe started it in June 2010 on their honeymoon, after years of going to conferences and never being able to find out beforehand who else was going. It launched in September 2010 at dConstruct in Brighton. You signed in with Twitter and it read your follow graph, then showed you the events the people you followed had put their names against. Afterward it collected the slides and the write-ups onto the same page, so a conference kept one address that outlived the conference site.

They went through Y Combinator in the winter 2011 batch and raised $1.4 million that September from European investors. In September 2013 they sold to Eventbrite, alongside the Argentinian ticketing company Eventioz. Eventbrite said at the time that it had no plans to shut Lanyrd down. That statement turned out to be true in the narrowest possible sense.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

The clever move was that Lanyrd never asked you to build a profile. It borrowed the one you had already built on Twitter, which meant the directory arrived populated on the day you signed up instead of asking you to seed it. Speakers claimed their own sessions, so the speaker list was maintained by the only people who reliably knew what they were speaking about.

The side effect nobody planned was archival. A conference's Lanyrd page was often better organized than the conference's own site, and it stayed up after the organizers let the domain lapse. For a few years in the early 2010s, if you wanted to know who spoke at some small event in 2011 and what they said, Lanyrd was the record. Then it was not.

~ the postmortem ~

Complaints that it was dying on the vine start appearing publicly in September 2015, two years after the sale. Daniel Appelquist wrote an open post that year describing outages that started during European business hours and lasted until somebody woke up in San Francisco, and listing the features that had never arrived. Nothing in the post was fixed.

On 24 January 2018 the site returned an error page instead of a homepage. It came back three days later in read-only mode with no statement about how long it would stay that way, and it never became a live product again. lanyrd.com now redirects to eventbrite.com, which is the acquisition finally admitting what it was. The archive of who spoke where, built by the speakers themselves over seven years, is not published anywhere.

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