Reading, PA

Capturing interests
Web site helps those with common causes meet face to face

By Bryan Behrenshausen

Lisa Dorman was excited to see her friend Ann. She would spend the weekend at Ann’s place in New York City, and together the pair of would attend a convention for “Scapers,” fans of the Sci-Fi Channel show “Farscape.”

Dorman of Reading knew Ann would be a great hostess. They worked out all the details over the phone.

She just wondered what Ann looked like because, well, Lisa and Ann had never actually met face-to-face. They built a friendship primarily via the Internet.

The weekend turned into one she will remember. Ann introduced Lisa to other “Farscape” fans Lisa knew only from the Net. In meeting about 50 other fans for dinner at Grand Central Station, Dorman discovered a sense of community she just didn’t feel online.

“It’s more personal, more fun in person,” she said. “We’re getting together with people who are very much like ourselves. I felt very much at home.”

And that exemplifies the goal of Web site www.meetup.com: to use the screen to get folks away from the screen.

Myles Weissleder. head of communication and marketing for Meetup.com, hopes the company will help other people, habitually, do what Lisa and Ann did. The New York Cityfirm, founded in June, utilizes two things to prosper, the Net and humanity’s natural propensity for community.

Users log on and input their interests and zip code, then register with an e-mail address. They’re shown groups of folks in their area who share their interests, as well as a list of venues available for the “meetup.” They vote on the place where they’d like to meet and are notified about the pending date via e-mail all for free.

Weissleder said the site was inspired in part by the book “Bowling Alone” by Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam. The author observes Americans slowly drifting apart, the bonds of community dissipating.

“Back in the day,” Weissleder said, “people were super-involved with the PTA or a bowling league. Now they are spending more time in front of screens. They’re not spending face time with their neighbors.”

After Sept. 11, Weissleder said the startup’s founders, Scott Heiferman, Matt Meeker and Peter Kamali saw the dire need for the resurgence of community.

“It blows my mind that this application wasn’t created and maximized five years ago,” Weissleder said. “It’s an amazing tool used to mobilize people around certain interests.”

About 137,000 people with 739 different interests are registered with Meetup.com. Meetups have occurred in 545 cities across 31 countries.

Popular meetup topics include the Atkins diet, screenwriting, witches, both the Edwards in 2004 and Dean in 2004 campaigns, and the band Dashboard Confessional.

In the Reading area, 151 registered users showed interest in a variety of topics, the top ten of which are, in descending order: Slashdot (a Web site for technology news nerds), BookCrossing (at which members trade books with one another), pagans, ghosts, LiveJournal (a diary Web site), witches, the band Ben Folds Five, yoga, Xanga (another online diary site), and anime (Japanese animation).

These numbers are changing every day.

“If you build it, they will come,” Weissleder said. “We’re creating hall meetings in hundreds of towns around the country, and there’s nothing better than that.

“Things happen when people get together.”

The first two weeks of January saw 374 meetups, 50 percent more than the previous December.

With Meetup.com, everyone wins, Weissleder said. People regain a sense community, Meetup.com continues to grow, and local businesses see more patrons.

“We are, in a sense, helping local economies because we’re sending people to coffee shops that they normally wouldn’t have visited,” Weissleder said.

When Meetup.com has its feet planted, it may begin to charge local businesses for placement as featured meetup venues.

But for now, its grassroots format will continue to work for free and work wonders for zealots like Dorman. While Reading does not currently have enough registered Scapers on Meetup.com, the Philadelphia area is teeming with them.

“These people are a lot like me,” Dorman said. “They seem to care about the same things. They care about a lot more than just ‘Farscape’ very young people to very old people.”

Dorman said she and the other Scapers have used Meetup to organize several “save ‘Farscape’” rallies, and certain leaders in different cities have used the site to tally attendees.

“I’ve met people from Canada, France, England, Australia,” she said. “This is the way the Internet has opened up the world for everybody.”

She said getting together in person beats sitting behind the keyboard any day.

“People can reach out to other people who have similar tastes and who like the same things, and actually become a family,” she said. “It’s kinda cool.”