Text is not Dead

In 2005, Dave Taylor said the following about Meetup beginning to charge a fee for its service:

When your business is a commodity service, how do you survive the transition from free to paid without sweetening the transaction? The answer: You don’t.

And that’s sad, because Meetup.com was a fascinating little company.

I joined Meetup in 2007, and I admit that I have a different perspective because I did not know it when it was completely free. However, I find the “commodity service” to a rather intelligent business design. Firstly, a person can register with the site, join multiple groups, attend the “meetings,” comment on the group’s page, and send direct messages to the other members and the organizer for free. The site doesn’t charge someone until that person decides to create his or her own meetup group. And as someone who has done this, I can say that the fee is quite reasonable ($15 a month for 3 months- the price, of course, decreases if more months are purchased at a time).

In any case, I find that the fee does a number of things: allows Meetup to continue to function successfully, weeds out the people who just want to start a group thus leaving people who are at least serious enough about their subject to spend the money, and keeps the site from being completely overrun with a ridiculous amount of groups who have very few members. And, in the two years that I have been using the site, with increasing frequency, I have not encountered any advertising or signs that the site has sold my email. Suffice to say, I am fairly pleased with the platform and feel that Taylor was incorrectly presumptuous in thinking that charging for the service was company suicide.

Clay Shirky addresses the Meetup phenomenon in Chapter 8 of Here Comes Everybody.

By registering people’s interests and location, Meetup can identify latent groups and help them come together. Heiferman bet that all over the United States (and later, the world) latent groups would be happy to get together if someone solved the coordination problem.

I completely agree. Meetup serves a growing sect of the population- people who have too little time to cultivate groups around them, keep them alive, and find others with common interests. And, while I’m sure the list of popular groups listed on page 197, which range from witches to Tori Amos, is accurate for 2008, I find that groups are forming as more social communities where the people share a very generalized interest (such as dining out) or as business networking opportunities.

I had a great deal of apprehension when the internet became so popular that people spent more time with their computers than interacting with 3-dimensional people. However, as Shirky continually points out, the internet is becoming an enormous platform for groups and communities to interact. Meetup took the notion of bringing people with commonalities together to a level that is accessible to all and functions- so far- rather smoothly. Altering its system from free to fee-based didn’t destroy it: it put a value to it.

This is an interesting video about Meetup, a bit odd, but pretty good.