Hi International

Faces: Scott Heiferman - Meetup.com

February 2005

If you wanted to join a group to learn Portuguese or find other people interested in antique cars, it used to mean hours or days scanning through online posts or trying to mine your personal contacts. No more, thanks to Meetup.com and its co-founder Scott Heiferman, 32. Meetup.com is a one-stop shop where people with shared interests can find each other and arrange to meet in person. "I think we're entering an era where people can organize community groups, organize groups of all sorts over the Web," Heiferman says. "We use the Internet to get people off the Internet," he laughs.

After 9/11, Heiferman, who lives in New York City, noticed that the people there had bonded into a stronger community. "It didn't last very long, but you thought of the people around you more as neighbors than as strangers," he says. This, coupled with the realization that people no longer maintained the community ties that they used to, led him and four friends to set up the site, although they had little idea what people would use it for. "It ended up being everything under the sun," he says. "That's the natural organic result of building a platform."

Just over two years later, Meetup.com has nearly two million members, who meet up for everything from language lessons to political causes to vintage car discussions. More proof that even in the Internet age, the ultimate human interaction is still done in person.

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