RoR: Forum

Webmaster, the link to this article does not work. Please correct.

EDIT: I deleted the ® from the title and the link works fine now. Contributors should note this so as not to include such special characters in their article titles.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 12/20, 5:05am)

Post 1

Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - 11:57pm

Thanks for fixing the link, Luke.

Interesting article. Let me ask what you think of the "coordinator" position. I think a lot of people don't bother starting a local group because they don't really have the time/energy to run it full time. But then we get this interesting problem that when someone wants a club in their area, nobody is signed up. I'm thinking if people could just "start" the group and just be a member, they can wait until there's enough critical mass.

Does there need to be a coordinator at all? What if you just allow anyone to set up meetings, and let a kind of free market work out the details?

Post 2

Thursday, December 22, 2005 - 5:39am

That seemed to work for Meetup. They have a proven system and have built their various "lessons learned" into their current structure. I just wonder about what possible "lessons learned" drove their high price of $19 per month with "special" prices for those who "act now" of $9 per month. We can do better than that! In the end, the free Yahoo! Groups have much the same functionality. Of course, their tech support hails from India and not America so the lower wages might explain it!

Having people register at a free site with a free subdirectory for a particular city might build momentum. When a member of that city steps to the plate to serve as Organizer for that city, they can all start meeting locally. The role of a Coordinator would be to keep an eye on things, to encourage registered members to become Organizers or Assistant Organizers, and to arrange larger gatherings of everyone in the state when the desire arises. Eventually, we could have national or international conferences.

I do not know enough about Web programming to know if my proposed URL structure would work, or whether it would have as intuitive and ergonomic a "look and feel" as another structure. The basic requirement remains the same: The structure must feel totally friendly and accessible to the novice user. Meetup does this.

So the real question becomes: How much of Meetup can we legally replicate for a standalone clubs site?

Post 3

Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 8:16am

Last night, Meetup hosted a meeting of all the Meetup Organizers in central Florida. I have kept my account active so I attended. About 30 people participated and Matt, one of the original two co-founders of Meetup, hosted the meeting and paid for dinner and drinks.

Overall, despite the costs the Organizers incur, Meetup has continued to grow. When I confronted Matt about the shocking spike in monthly costs back in the middle of 2005, he shared with us the origins of Meetup. Back in 2000, he and his buddy had just sold another Internet company they had grown over the years. They lived comfortably in New York City on the profits while they pondered their next move in the market. They basically coasted for a year before the September 11, 2001 attack.

The change in demeanor of their fellow New York City dwellers struck them most in the aftershocks of that attack. They noticed a shift in attitudes of the average people on the street. Everyone seemed more awake, alive, alert, friendly, warm, inviting, benevolent and desiring to bond with others. This inspired them to take advantage of a conspicious vacuum in the Internet market. They knew of no service that allowed people of common interests to meet face to face using the Internet as a tool. According to the book Bowling Alone, changes in demographics since the 1950s had drastically reduced the social contact of Americans outside work and home. Faith Popcorn called this phenomenon Cocooning in her book of the same name. They invented Meetup to fill that void.

Thus did Meetup arise through two talented guys with no particular long range business plan or model or template. They just decided to wing the enterprise by the seats of their pants to see what happened. As interest grew, the Howard Dean campaign's use of the tool gave them a special boost in the public eye.

They finally had to take a long range look at how they planned to do business. They decided to make the tool much more powerful and flexible and interviewed over 100 software engineers before finding one who could meet the challenge. With powerful new features added, they found themselves overwhelmed with interested parties. They looked at many different business models before finally settling on the one they now use.

Meetup now employs a full time staff of 35. Even the owner of Townhall.com confessed that he made a mistake in abandoning Meetup. His own site's attempt to replace their usage of Meetup with its own tool folded after three months due to lack of interest.

I recommend keeping a close eye on Meetup as a force that will shape global culture to some tangible degree. It recently earned a section of commentary as such in the recent book Applebee's America. That so many use the service despite the cost speaks of the desire of people to bond with others.

Post 4

Friday, September 9, 2011 - 4:48am