How we bootstrapped Lanyrd using Twitter's social graph

Lanyrd.comHow we bootstrapped Lanyrd using Twitter’s social graph Simon Willison @simonw

Lanyrd.com Deﬁnitive database of professional events and speakers

Lanyrd.com Deﬁnitive database Social event recommendation of professional events Comprehensive speaker proﬁles and speakers Archive of slides, notes and video

Lanyrd.com Demo

Lanyrd.comWhy does it work?•The right crowdsourcing incentives•Wiki-style shared ownership•The parts support the whole•Twitter!

Lanyrd.comWhy Twitter?•It’s where the event discussion happens•Speakers promote their Twitter accounts•Follow beats Friend for recommendations•Culturally amenable to public proﬁles

Lanyrd.comBootstrapping•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

Lanyrd.com 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

Lanyrd.comRedis set intersection

Lanyrd.comCalendar•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.comPros•One-click signup•Naturally viral•Instant personalisation•Pre-created proﬁles, ready to be claimed•APIs are pleasant to work with

Lanyrd.comCons•One big, scary dependency•No namespace control•Hard to optimise, as no local graph copy•Some users follow/are-followed a LOT•OAuth permissions...

Lanyrd.com Permissions hell

Lanyrd.com Tweet this: @lanyrd attending #londonweb lanyrd.com/adthp

http://lanyrd.com	99
http://londonstartupevents.co.uk	29
http://127.0.0.1	1

How we bootstrapped Lanyrd using Twitter's social graph

by Simon Willison

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