Simon Willison’s Weblog

What role will Social Media play in 2012 conferences? For example what platforms will attendees be using to communicate and network?

16th January 2012

My answer to What role will Social Media play in 2012 conferences? For example what platforms will attendees be using to communicate and network? on Quora

I’m a co-founder of http://lanyrd.com/—which could be described as a social media platform for events.

We’re strongly integrated with Twitter—if you sign in to Lanyrd with Twitter we’ll recommend events to you based on the people you follow.

We have a large community of attendees, speakers and organisers using our site to find the right events to attend and see who else is going to be there. People also use us to gather together slides, notes and videos from events during and afterwards—take a look at the coverage collected by last year’s LeWeb for example: http://lanyrd.com/2011/leweb/

Our next focus will be improving the experience while at a conference. We’ve started by focusing on the essentials (like an offline event schedule and attendee list stored on your iPhone via our app) but we know that there’s plenty more for us to do here. We don’t like to pre-announce features, but we’ll be investing a lot of effort in this side of things in the coming months.