I finally got round to checking out Lanyrd today - I'd heard good things about it on the twitters - and I really like the service.
It basically is designed for conferences and meetups, that sort of thing. It allows you to add upcoming conferences, link to websites, Twitter accounts, hashtags etc. You can search by topic, location, attendees and speakers. It looks like a great way to organise buzz around upcoming conferences. You can also see what your friends on Twitter are attending and tracking, a really nice feature since I can see instantly the most interesting conferences coming up.
But the key for me is the coverage side of Lanyrd - after the conference everyone can add video, blog posts, slides, liveblogs, basically everything to the Lanyrd page. This is great because it allows crowdsourced organisation of discussion around the conference - not only what the organisers curate.
I found what looks like a great conference coming up in January here in Portsmouth - the Heart & Sole conference - which I'm probably going to try and get to, which I wouldn't have found without Lanyrd. And if I do write it up or record any video, I'll be sure to link to it through Lanyrd.
I did have a small issue - there's a 'Subscribe to this calendar' link for places. For instance I want to subscribe to all upcoming conferences in Portsmouth, but the link is a webcal link - so when I clicked it did nothing. I think this is because I don't use Outlook or iCal, but Google Calendar instead. I tweeted about it and I got a great response pretty quickly, which sorted the issue (you have to copy the link and paste it into gCal). Really awesome that Lanyrd are looking after people like that.
The one thing I would like to see is RSS feeds as well as calendar links - so I can see when new conferences are added in my area. Hopefully Lanyrd can implement this.
Overall I really like Lanyrd and look forward to using it more...
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