• There Is No SXSW. The Perfect Extension For Those Not Here.

    Mg Siegler

    MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

    Saturday, March 12th, 2011

    By now, even if you’re not at SXSW, you’re likely sick of SXSW. Why? Because every other damn tweet is about SXSW. I’m here, and tweeting about it, and I’m sick of it. But luckily Lanyrd has created the perfect extension.

    Not at SXSW is an extension for both Chrome and Firefox that alters Twitter.com to remove all tweets that reference the conference. But that’s not good enough. So the extension also blocks tweets from all those Twitter users known to be attending SXSW!

    It’s brilliant. It’s not perfect, but it’s close.

    And it’s easy enough to turn the extension on and off from Twitter.com (just click on the new link at the top of your stream that shows you how many tweets are being hidden due to SXSWness). From here you can also decide to just hide tweets with the hashtag #sxsw or #sxswi and/or the known attendees.

    And lest you think Lanyrd are just SXSW haters, they’re also the ones behind maybe the best (unofficial) SXSW guide for Austin. They’re just smart enough to realize that not everyone cares about the conference — or worse, that some people are forced to unfollow users to stop the influx of SXSW-related tweets.

    Other startups have extensions to selectively block tweets from your stream — Slipstream is a great tool for this — but Lanyrd is built for one purpose alone: nuking tech/film/music hipsters.

    You’re welcome.

    Company: Lanyrd
    Website: lanyrd.com
    Funding: $1.4M

    Lanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers. Visitors can sign in with Twitter to see events their friends are attending or speaking at, submit new events, add talks that they have given and build up their speaker profile.

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