This document describes how Lanyrd.com bootstrapped their social event and speaker database site by leveraging Twitter's social graph and APIs. They were able to quickly build profiles for 500 speakers before launching by accessing public Twitter account information. Using Twitter follower data stored in Redis and speaker information indexed by Solr, Lanyrd can provide personalized event recommendations to users. While relying on Twitter introduced some risks, it was an effective way to initially populate the site with user and event data.

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

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Definitive database
of professional events
and speakers

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

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Demo

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

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

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Bootstrapping
•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

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More demos

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Key Twitter APIs

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friends/ids.json
[43593, 19972629, 778518,
1249881, 70478255, 3829151,
350373, 12161, 13141, 751953,
22785347, 2633711, 14835908,
143883, 14159138, 11963132,
14917418, 15732699,
756475, ...]

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friendships/create

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users/search.json

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Under the hood

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Secret weapon #1: Redis

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Secret weapon #2: Solr

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Redis set intersection

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Calendar
•Pull user’s friends/ids.json
•Cache for ten hours
•Store in Redis
•Solr search: attendees:(34722 OR 1312313 OR...

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Pros and cons

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

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

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Permissions hell

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