Comments on: NCTimes covers Meetups

By: route66

route66 — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:59:57 +0000

Beckie, if a location and date are selected, Evite works well. A sports bar on Monday night would have plenty of frosty beverages.

By: Beckie

Beckie — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:53:20 +0000

I vote party! Or maybe a messageboard to facilitate party planning activities and
vote on frosty beverages named after famous persona.

By: oso

oso — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:59:15 +0000

I know I’ll be looking out for other SD Bloggers at Joelle’s Rock the Walk benefit concert at the Casbah on Friday, the 24th. Hope to see some of you there.

By: Joe Crawford

Joe Crawford — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:18:12 +0000

I’m a big believer in “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or stupidity” — and my experience with the Web Design Meetups in San Diego at various coffeehouses (Claire de Lune, The Living Room, The Other Side) is that the venues have *no* idea that people are coming, at least not for our meeting.

The bigger problem when it comes to location is that you have to be a paid subscriber to suggest a meetup “site.” Also, the selection of locations to vote on (I have suggested several venues in the last few years) just seems to be random. I suspect there’s some broken GIS “which is closest to the popular zip codes for this area” type code that just messes it all up.

I myself is not averse to using Meetup for a blogger meetup. Like I said, I’ve had good experiences with the webdesign ones and meetup.

By: MAS

MAS — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:43:12 +0000

Back before I learned about the rigged voting, I wrote this 1/11/2003 account.

By: MAS

MAS — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:38:45 +0000

The problem with MeetUp is the venue voting is rigged. I learned this later from a Wesley
Clark Meetup organizer. No matter how the group voted, Meetup selected the venue based
upon it’s relationships. I can’t get into the exact specifics, but someone on the inside
informed me that Meetup sends the group to the venue that bids the highest, NOT where
the members vote to go.

I went to about 6-7 of the SD Blogger meetups and can confirm that we were often dumped
at locations that nobody voted for. One was a Starbucks that closed 30 minutes after
we arrived. Another was a closed office loft in South Gaslamp. The Gaslamp meeting really
pissed us off cause you have a bunch of strangers trying to meet, locked outside a closed
building on a dark street in the rain.

I’m all for meeting my fellow SD Bloggers, but I will NEVER use Meetup to faciliate
that meeting.