The New York Times

:nytimes:

Meeting Site Stands Nearly Alone

By BOB TEDESCHI

Why is Meetup.com so alone?

In nearly every Internet category imaginable, successful sites have triggered copycats, sometimes by the dozens. But Meetup, which has helped more than 30,000 groups - including knitters, Republicans and pug owners - organize online and meet offline in the last two years, and has earned a following among technology's elite, remains virtually without competition.

So far, Meetup has signed up roughly two million users who rely on it to help find people with similar political or business interests or hobbies. African music fans in Manhattan, for instance, can hook up with 12 like-minded people next Monday through Meetup .com, while 243 witches in Seattle have used the site to organize a meeting on Oct. 26. And the site - which is announcing a revamped version of its Web site today that its executives hope will position it for further growth - continues to operate as if it is being pursued by the competition.

Meetup Inc., which is based in New York, was created in 2002 as a way to provide groups the means to meet more easily offline. It attracted financial backing from noted venture capitalists like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and eBay's founder, Pierre M. Omidyar, among others, and slowly built its operations to the point where it now employs 28 people. It gained some renown early last year when Howard Dean supporters relied on the service to raise money and awareness for his presidential bid.

Hundreds of thousands of the site's registrants now attend monthly "meet-ups," as they are known, in coffee shops, bookstores and other public places. An undisclosed number of them pay the Web site $3 a month for the right to display extra photos on their Meetup Web pages, among other things. The company earns additional revenue from advertisers and more established organizations looking to recruit members, as well as enterprises - from Starbucks outlets to the Essex Lounge in the Lower East Side of Manhattan - looking to convert Meetup visitors into regular paying customers.

The new Web site, which the company has tested in recent weeks, represents more than a subtle face lift. Scott Heiferman, the chief executive of Meetup, said the redesign signals a philosophical change - the company is handing more control to its users.

For instance, in Meetup's previous incarnation, the site helped people organize meetings in certain neighborhoods, on certain dates and at specific places chosen by Meetup workers in New York. The company also now asks groups to select a leader to send meeting notices and other notes to attendees.

"So instead of some dorks in New York telling you what to do, you can create a meet- up anywhere about anything," Mr. Heiferman said. "They're more owners of their groups than renters now."

Mr. Heiferman, who also co-founded fotolog.net, a photo Web site, and who won the innovator of the year award from Technology Review magazine last week, said these changes had yielded "a lot of lessons that can be applied to other companies and technologies, like what happens when you hand over the reins to people and let them dictate what happens."

So far, Mr. Heiferman said, groups who have tried the new version of Meetup have seen their meeting attendance increase significantly.

Partly because of the site's recent technology investments, Meetup is not yet profitable, although Mr. Heiferman said he expected to turn a profit next year. As for the lack of competition, he said he believed that potential competitors might have been intimidated by the work involved.

"We needed to make 5,000 calls a month to Starbucks and local cafes and bars and pizza joints saying, 'Hey, expect 25 knitters tonight,' and making sure they're actually open," Mr. Heiferman said.

By handing the responsibility for such things to group leaders, Meetup could be showing prospective competitors an easier way to join the fray. But Mr. Heiferman said he was not worried that might happen because Meetup had already created so many groups. "It's like eBay, in that people realize it's better to use a system where there are already people there," he said.

So-called networking Web sites would be logical places to look for potential competition, but Friendster, Tickle and business networking sites like Ryze and LinkedIn have strayed little from their focus on enabling one-to-one communication. And Yahoo Groups, which helps users organize online groups, offers no tools to help people get together offline.

One site with the potential to compete with Meetup is not a business, but a nonprofit initiative. I-Neighbors.org, which helps Internet users set up neighborhood Web sites, was introduced in August. Within four weeks, it attracted users from more than 3,000 neighborhoods, who use the site to share information about local services, events and personal interests, among other things.

Keith N. Hampton, an urban studies professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the site as a research project, to study the Internet's effect on small communities, and said he had no intention of competing with Meetup or turning a profit.

Mr. Hampton said he was "a little shocked" at the response to his site among prospective advertisers. "They said, 'What a brilliant way to do local marketing,' " Mr. Hampton said. "I had everyone from those X2 camera people to the yellow pages companies wanting to do business with me."

The attraction was especially strong for local businesses, which could aim at users in a small geographical range, as Meetup's advertisers can. But Mr. Hampton turned them away, fearing that ads could diminish the value of his research.

Mr. Hampton was not encouraging to others who see business opportunity. "My hunch is that if people replicated it, they'd still go down the wrong route," he said. Through two years of testing the service in Boston, Mr. Hampton said: "We know, for example, that if you put up a chat room, it'll never get used or if you grow the size of the neighborhoods too big, it becomes a problem. And these neighborhoods may be too small to get many direct marketers interested."

Charlene Li, an advertising analyst with Forrester Research, agreed. Only about 10 percent of the businesses listed in the yellow pages pay for ads, she said, and only about 10 percent of those businesses advertise online. "The biggest problem for local online advertising is that businesses have to understand the value of a lead. And, frankly, a lot of them have no idea."

That will begin to change next year, Ms. Li said, as more local marketers begin to experiment with Internet sites like Google and Yahoo's Overture unit, which have both introduced search advertising services aimed at local businesses.

In the meantime, Ms. Li said locally oriented sites like Meetup and organizations like I-Neighbors would do well to include local companies "not necessarily as advertisers, but as part of the dialog."

For instance, Ms. Li said, the cross-stitch group that she had helped start on Meetup would probably enjoy hearing about a new kind of yarn from a local fabric store, or about a new craft store that is opening.

"Businesses are an important part of a community," Ms. Li said. "It's not all evil."

The above is quoted from this article.