Lanyrd: a new Twitter mashup for conferences

Lanyrd is a new social directory for conferences launched just a few days ago. It integrates with Twitter to allow you to list conferences you are organizing, speaking at, attending, or just following. It is a social directory in the sense that everyone can edit this information (I don’t know who started the Science Online London 2010 page), and that you can see the conferences of your Twitter contacts. Future versions of Lanyrd will do a lot more (you can see some of the upcoming features at the dConstruct 2010 page), but the site is already useful and just looks gorgeous.

The Lanyrd blog launched yesterday and the first post contains some interesting background information. Lanyrd is a joint project by web developers and newly-weds Simon Willison and Natalie Downe. They launched Lanyrd from Morocco while on an extended honeymoon and don’t plan to be back to England before the end of next year.

Sites such as Eventbrite, Upcoming or Slideshare have been around for a while. Twitter is becoming an increasingly useful tool for conferences (The Great Science Online London Tweetup). And Lanyrd is one of the nicest examples that I have seen so far that integrates Twitter into a service targeted at conference attendees.