Debalkanizing Meetup.com

This is an open letter to the people who run Meetup.com.

First off I want to let you know the people you serve truly appreciate what you have put together. I've been attending Meetups for years and its really great to have this turnkey system for spawning associations. However I'm also disappointed to see that every would be Craig is spawning their own social network in an attempt to lure singles into their micro-emipre.

I think the biggest problem is that membership is a commodity and everyone wants in on the action.

I am not sure how this can be solved, but I am thinking along the lines of this: instead of "owning groups", people should be put in the role of presenting events. that is, I am holding a meeting at this location with these properties: its for singles, it costs x$, it has these keywords. Now instead of having to actively join a group, all you have to do is post your location, interests, and how far you would be willing to travel.

Now, on your meetup dashboard, you get a list of the events relevant to you. You, the attendee, can search by or bookmark (or block) presentors, rank interest, etc., to affect your searches, but the event owner never gets "ownership" of you as an attendee. If they want to build their miniature empire, its up to them to do so, but the network does not exist as a marketing enabler, but purely as an event promotion system.

The advantage to the presentor is that they automatically have access to everyone in the site's membership providing they properly categorize their event. They may collecct aggreate RSVP data for booking purposes but not individual contact data. If they want to build an online interchange, forum, or other system wherein members are publically exposed and tracked, they can use facebook or what have you.

This removes the burden on members of having to constantly opt in to group after group, and focuses the effort of the site on its intended purpose: maximizing exposure to events and increasing offline congress. It also forces the event promoters to play nice and put their energy into making good events, not glomming after members; and since most of the new "groups" seem to be essentially wrappers for a single recurring event anyway, there is really no practical difference for most of the smaller players.