As far as Andrew, if/once you get to know him, he’s actually a very very reasonable and friendly guy. He’s just a bit passionate and opinionated about things. Read his blog for a little while and you’ll get his style.

Upcoming.org also has some functionality for rsvp’ing. If you guys would like to test drive WhizSpark, I wouldn’t mind you using the yet unlaunched stuff, if you provide feedback for improvement. At some point I would charge. But, if you’d like to use it for 6 months in exchange for feedback, I could set that up. It might give you some thoughts for what you are coding too.

Oh an Pete, nice post, well done.

I said I didn’t want to get into Meetup too much at this time, however, there are a few things as a (relatively brief) member of that site that I’ve noticed that I’m willing to share at the present time.

RE: meetup choosing to cater to their customers and not show them advertising? I disagree. Did you see the Google Adsense they’re using? They’ve also been running premium memberships for some time. It’s their fault, not their customers, that they haven’t shown enough value for more people registered on their site to want to pay for the premium services. What, they give me a hyperlink in my profile if I pay them $5/month? That’s an absurd incentive. One can get dozens of links, ping many different services, etc, by making one blog post, so where is the value there to pay for a freaking profile link? So when a new member joins the group, I have to do the copy/paste to get to their site. Gee, that’s real accomodating, Meetup, thanks. They have 30+ people in their organization and somebody over there has to be responsible for making more members interested in paying for premium services, don’t you think? Hasn’t anybody realized something as simple as a hyperlink?

But instead of maybe firing a few people, what is their solution? Let’s go after the organizers. Go after the people who are doing 99% of the work to manage and evangelize the groups as well as their site. Not only are these organizers unpaid, they actually have to pay now. Meetup has never organized or been to any of our meetings and they weren’t facillitators in my case of anything. They are simply a place with an RSVP script that the group was using.

Teman ranted wrongly about our group being cheap but he wasn’t there and neither were you. Nobody in our group was getting outraged or ‘whining’ about the situation and it’s risky to characterize events that one wasn’t actually present at. Rather, we were reasonably discussing the options and the option we actually chose was to stay with Meetup — for the time being.

Excuse me, but I wasn’t donating to Meetup.com because I was grateful for them doing almost nothing, I was donating to our group organizer, Anita for doing almost everything. It mattered none to me what organization software was used either before joining the group, during the group or in the future.

This is not an issue of being cheap, it’s an issue of value vs. perceived value. The gas to get to the meetup (not to mention parking) cost me more than the $2 USD I chipped in, along with others outside the city, I’m sure

Here’s something else of note: I didn’t find out about our Seattle group through meetup. I found out about the group through a blogger in the group posting on his own blog (Robert Scoble) which I was subscribed to long before even knowing about Meetup. From a member perspective, the only thing I have ever really used in meetup is the RSVP function which is hardly worthy of hundreds of dollars a year per group since it’s used only once a month for all of one minute. I’ve made a couple of posts on the messageboards but one can setup a messageboard in five minutes as there are dozens of open source alternatives there, so again, no real value there.

There are over 300 people in our group, so it is pennies per member per year if everybody chipped in. Money is not the issue when you are talking about pocket change per member; the issue is whether or not Meetup brings the group any significant value (besides the RSVP function) and if something else was used could it better benefit all the group members? I think that’s where the big question mark lies.

Personally, I didn’t care for it when it was free, so why should I be more concerned now that it’s costing the organizer money?

I also wasn’t calling you whiners. I was paraphrasing Andrew. I don’t disagree with him per se. But, that wasn’t the meaning behind my post. And I think that meetup was a bit to quick to be so concilliatory. A company needs to know when to walk away from customers that don’t bring them any value. If you guys don’t find the service right for you because of the fee, and don’t want to pay it and want to complain publicly, than so be it. But, I wouldn’t expect a company to be happy about it. They’ve been providing you a free service for a long time, and they deserve a bit of credit for that. Further, it is human to defend decisions in the manner that they have (ie calling you a name), as you have so perfectly shown in the way that you defend yourself.

As far as their choice of monetization routes. As I’ve written on my weblog, It is not the choice I would have made. But, I respect it tremendously. They have chosen to cater to their customers, instead of serving their customers to advertisers, which is the monetization route that I would have chosen. Their decision shows that they respect “you” and your cause(s)… most of all.

As far as how much time I have spent building software for events, your math is accurate. It is a lot of time. And that is just me. As Andrew pointed out, there are also a lot more people that have contributed. What we are doing is a lot more feature rich than meetup and we are focussed on providing the service for larger events. Thus, the longer time frame. My point, which I didn’t illustrate effectively, was that any project takes time. And for the price, meetup offers a lot of value.

As far as your project goes…Looking forward to seeing this. I am all for people rolling their own code. If you average out the time spent, I am not sure there is a payback. But, not everyone is interested in the payback. So, more power to you. If you are looking for a head start, I’d reccommend you check out CivicSpace’s Drupal plugin for organizing events. Boris Mann of bryght is a good guy to talk to re: that.

Peace (I hope).
-Pete

Boston? Right on. Hopefully a Red Sox fan!

The rest of your comment makes little, or no sense…especially the throwing up reference. I seriously don’t even get it.

I’m sure you are a decent guy despite all of this silliness, but your sense of humor is slight and your recognition of it is completely lacking. Good luck with whatever it is you do, and next time you are in Boston, we can do a meetup. I’ll bring the $2.

LOL!