In attendence:

Stuart Henshall from Skype Journal

Bill, also from Skype Journal

Charles from Talk121.com eyeing the M1400 in portrait mode. He asked me the brand name several times and wrote it down towards the end of the night. I think a cash register will be ringing soon.

Sites we discussed:
- Delicious
- Flickr
- Furl

I was in Tablet PC and the Motion M1400 demo mode showing the trio the strengths of the Tablet PC. They all seemed not to be as concerned by the price tag ($2500) as some on the internet are about the pricing (even I was a doubter about the expense at one time). We also looked at the PSP, recorded a really short podcast and a dark (needs refining to be publishable) video. Bill and Stuart opened Charles eyes to a world of possibilities involving Skype and his business.

The one thing none of us actually did at the Skype meetup is actually fired up and used … Skype!

Speaking of meetups, I just saw in the aggregator that meetup.com is going to start requiring group organizers to pay a monthly fee ($9/month) in order to run the group. Anita, better get up a tip jar for the Seattle blogger group to help defray these costs; I don’t think it’s fair that the organizer should be the one to have to foot the bill and organize the meetups. The people who attend and benefit from the meetups should share in the associated costs. Then again, who needs meetup.com for their blogger meetup anyway? (meetup.com sure thinks we do) Anybody could setup their own site and organize a meetup and skip the $9/month altogether. Let me know if you go that direction, Anita.

Sort of a bummer move by meetup.com IMO. Here they suck in a bunch of people, build up the service and then say: uh oh, we need to make (more) money! They did previously have a paid members version that offered a few features that mostly didn’t appeal to me and I’m guessing others as well if they needed to make this move. According to the change page they say these changes were requested by organizers, so maybe I’m missing something here. I’m not an organizer of these events, so perhaps there is another side to this.

I also realize this is how sites like Google got off the ground: build it, excite and interest people and then figure out how to monetize it later.

But there aren’t many Googles out there …

Update 4/13/05: Phil Wolff stopped by, commented, and has me read more carefully the new meetup.com numbers because it’s even more expensive. It’s actually $19/month if you are organizing a brand new group. The $9/month is a special 2005 price for existing organizers.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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• Seattle Skype meetup April 12
• Henshall launches Skype Journal
• Art extravaganza at Feb 2005 Seattle Blogger Meetup
• Showdown at the Seattle Meetup Corral (4/2005)
• Meetup to introduce new features
• Yay or nay: Skype now being downloaded in Kazaa