Ever yearn to meet up with folks who share a single, powerful passion? It might be "Xena: Warrior Princess," knitting, ferrets, the French language, jewelry making, the video-game Ultima, motherhood, live journals or any one of more than 700 different interests.
Enter Meetup, a free Internet-based service that organizes local gatherings about anything for anybody in any city in any country. It's designed to nudge people off the couch, away from too much TV and computer time, into face-to-face interaction with people who have similar interests.
The initial irony is that anyone interested in Meetup must start at a computer and sign on to www.meetup.com to connect with like-minded others. "You kind of need to get online," admits co-founder Myles Weissleder, "but it [the computer] is only a conduit to the community."
The Meetup site is designed to be the ultimate social organizer, the connected concierge, the special-interest matchmaker that allows an individual to register, select an interest group and be matched with neighbors who share that interest.
The brainchild of Scott Heiferman, Matt Meeker, Peter Kamali and some of their friends, Meetup relies on a computer to get things rolling -- it sends out invitations to interested parties, allows them to select one of three suggested public venues for their meetings, tallies votes, sends out final invitations, collects RSVPs and makes reservations at the chosen meeting site. Everything that follows is up to the participants.
"In six months we've already got 123,624 people signed up for meetups in local cafes [and] community meeting rooms in 540 cities across 31 different countries," Weissleder says. And the numbers are growing. Islamabad, Pakistan; Bogota, Colombia; Jakarta, Indonesia; Bristol, England; Tartu, Estonia; Bucharest, Romania; and Waterloo, Belgium, are the most recent additions to the list of participating cities.
Why don't crochet addicts in Islamabad, Chihuahua lovers in Toronto or pagans in Pasadena just find each other and get on with it? Heiferman asked himself that question.
He'd been reading "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," by Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam. Putnam observes that American society was eroding as individuals disconnected from their families, neighbors and communities because of longer commutes and more time spent watching television and cruising endless Web destinations. It was Sept. 11 that motivated Scott and his partners to go to work on some tangible way of fostering community.
