RE: [UG-ADMINS] Next Gen UGs and Social Networks

> > -- where does meetup.com fit in? observed > advantages/disadvantages? > > Meetup.com is fine for non-techies to organize, but there are some > fundamental problems: > > 1. Price-point. > For what you pay a month, you could get a decent webhost with some > kind of panel and get the same functionality, with custom graphics. > > 2. Slow. > > 3. Inflexible. > Some of this has been corrected over time, but there are still a lot > of brittle "this is how Meetup works" mis-features that can't be > worked around. Agreed on all points. While they have some handy features, for tech related groups what they do have really isn't great. > 4. Ghost-town > There are a lot of meetup groups that look active, until you try to > actually go to a meeting or interact with its members... > Then you find out that it hasn't really existed for a year or so. Yeah, I think this is the biggest one - there are so many fragmented, dis-organized and poorly run groups. While this may be ok in some cases for non-techs, it doesn't cut for trying to build real communities online for techs. Especially since techs have had online communities for many years - and meetup.com doesn't build on any prior lessons learned from running an online community. I would only add perhaps a #5, which is related to the above as well... the quality of people generally roaming around meetup.com are lesser than those who would participate in a real user group of sorts. Granted, I've met some great people on meetup.com, but generally this is the exception. H