It’s becoming more and more painfully obvious that Meetup has jumped the shark, we might as well start a group working on an open source alternative for WordPress users. Anyone interested in working on this? ¶
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Matt Mullenweg is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web. 
Gregory Wild-Smith | April 19th, 2005 @ 5:37 pm |
Can’t see that it would be too hard. Its not a sophisticated system. While I couldn’t commit to running it I’d be happy to commit to helping develop/design it….
Dante | April 19th, 2005 @ 5:43 pm |
I’d be more than happy to contribute!
David | April 19th, 2005 @ 5:45 pm |
Yep, absolutely. Please let me know if any help is needed on the front-end/look and feel/design side of things — I’d be more than happy to help out.
David | April 19th, 2005 @ 5:45 pm |
Yep, absolutely. Please let me know if any help is needed on the front-end/look and feel/design side of things — I’d be more than happy to help out.
Ross M Karchner | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:00 pm |
“jump the shark” is a bit harsh, I think– If the choice came down to advertising vs. getting money from users, they might have made the right choice. Once a site accepts advertising, the advertiser becomes the customer and the users become the product to be delivered.
There are worse things than depending on your users.
Of course, this isn’t meant to discourage anyone from working on an open source alternative
Mike | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:04 pm |
Is there a way that Upcoming.org can be used as a Meetup replacement? Andy has done some great work with this lately, and I’d love to see it integrated with WordPress — in fact, it would be amazing and I would move multiple Meetup groups to it. I’m very interested in working on this.
Matt | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:05 pm |
I think that they’re punishing their most valuable users. They could support advertising in a tasteful way, or they could introduce “premium” features that cost more, but charging for something that used to be free is a bad, bad idea.
Matt | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:08 pm |
There are some WordPress event plugins too: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Calendar_Event .
Andy Skelton | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:36 pm |
It would be easier to hack a system out of WP1.5 than to build one from the ground up. Future posts, categorized by location, different comment types for RSVPs and questions/comments, a ‘theme’ to handle it all… why not?
Firas | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:38 pm |
+1 for upcoming.org
The event plugins are mainly personal planning based, they’re a great tool for individuals (ie. things that should key off upcoming.org’s API).
‘More software’ is rarely the answer
Matt | April 19th, 2005 @ 6:45 pm |
I like Upcoming, but I also really liked and trusted Meetup. Upcoming.org is another propietary system.
Geof F. Morris | April 19th, 2005 @ 7:41 pm |
Matt, seems to me that the way to truly build it open-source is to develop a system that small organizations can use on their own with minimal fuss.
Alternately, just build something over XFN.
Geof F. Morris | April 19th, 2005 @ 8:02 pm |
Thinking more … if you really do distribute it, isn’t the best way to share data going to be some kind of XML/RDF format that can be easily indexed and shared? In the US, the easy way to do that is via ZIP [and at one point, I had pointers to lat/long data of centers of ZIP areas for this concert-finder app that never got off the ground], but if you also do a city/state/province RDF/XML, you have something that’s searchable.
The key then is to create a toolset that’s good at creating data according to the specification, and then let the search market [Technorati, Google, Yahoo!] help end-users find what events are close to them.
Or I could be just talking out my butt again.
Matt | April 19th, 2005 @ 8:04 pm |
Well on wordpress.org we already have over 17,000 registered users, a good portion of them have links to their blog in their profile. We could spider for geotag data. We could also allow people to add lat/long or zip code information to their profile and then aggregate people based on that.
Geof F. Morris | April 19th, 2005 @ 8:08 pm |
Lat/long data is a great way to go [easy to calculate distances
], but it’s hard for people to find their lat/long without GPS or someone who knows. I had to do some digging to find mine here in town.
Unless, of course, there’s some great tool I’m missing, or if Google Maps can do lat/long outputs for you and I’ve been missing that.
Matt | April 19th, 2005 @ 8:11 pm |
You can extract your lat/long from a couple of the map services, that’s how I did it back when I first user GeoURL. If we could make it a wizard of some sort that’d be cool. Like opening Google Maps in a frame and then clicking a button when you find your house.
Geof F. Morris | April 19th, 2005 @ 8:17 pm |
Yeah, that kind of location extraction tool is truly needed, and it’s probably a key cog in making such an engine go. You could search for all coded events in your area, but that seems scattershot; the ideal way to do it is to index, but at that point, you’re running into storage, indexing, and money problems for open sourcers, I’d imagine…
What do people need to know to use such a service?
Where they are.
What events are near them.
What those events entail.
The first two data points are easier to define than the third, because the third is a host-generated datapoint, and my idea of “cool party” and yours might be different, Matt.
Hmmmmm … need sleep to ponder.
jsp | April 19th, 2005 @ 10:40 pm |
Re: the lat/long question, you can actually get some of the way there via this kludge:
1. Go to maps.google.com, and enter the address/ZIP of a place *near* where you want.
2. Zoom as much as you can.
3. Change to “satellite” view.
4. Double-click just above/below (or wherever the actual address is) to re-center the map.
At this point, you can copy the “link to this page”, which will be in the format:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1600+Pennsylvania+Avenue,+Washington,+D.C.&ll=38.899541,-77.036519&spn=0.015213,0.021329&t=k&hl=en
Note the lat/long. The reason you have to double-click to re-center (and therefore use a slightly imprecise address) is because otherwise the link just uses the ’spn’ reference, and I’m not sure how that corresponds to the actual lat/long. Of course, on the other hand, I don’t know if you really need 8 digits of precision for this sort of stuff anyway…
jsp | April 19th, 2005 @ 10:41 pm |
Holy crap that looks like shit. These ever-narrower boxes need to go.
Chris Messina | April 20th, 2005 @ 1:43 am |
Matt, we’re already working on this at CivicSpace. It seems silly to duplicate effort. Check out these forum posts for more and to contribute to the discussion!
Gregory Wild-Smith | April 20th, 2005 @ 1:48 am |
Damn you Matt – I couldn’t sleep last night because my brain was buzzing over ideas for this thing!
You’re right tho – needs to be original and OSS, either forked from WP or built from scratch.
Google Maps isn’t the best choice – as its coverage outside North America is well… crap. Something like Multimap.com is much much better, but thats a debate for when its running, not now.
Matthew Gotth-Olsen | April 20th, 2005 @ 2:18 am |
I’d release something like this as both a binary and a service (website) that people could use if they didn’t want to screw about with hosting and maintainence.
Gregory Wild-Smith | April 20th, 2005 @ 2:24 am |
Well.. yeah. Surely that would be the point?
Mark | April 20th, 2005 @ 3:47 am |
Hmmm….if code is what you are looking for, I would be glad to help out.
On the same note, this could be a GREAT starting point for the $500 prize for a community plugin for Wordpress in the Plugin competition.
Mark | April 20th, 2005 @ 3:48 am |
pS: Why does my blog URI get cut off in the comment link?
Gregory Wild-Smith | April 20th, 2005 @ 5:10 am |
What’s your url?
I think to do it properly would be more complicated than just a plugin…
Ken Walker | April 20th, 2005 @ 5:57 am |
Matt, why duplicate efforts? I think Nat Freidman is trying to accomplish something similar with Hula:
http://www.hula-project.com
For more info, check out the blog:
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
Pete Prodoehl | April 20th, 2005 @ 6:55 am |
Need the lat/lon coords for a US address? Try http://geocoder.us/
Alex Bischoff | April 20th, 2005 @ 8:06 am |
I was discussing this with Adam Keys the other day (a fellow Dallas-ite) and he too pondered whether Upcoming could be made to do this — perhaps through a middle-man app which would automatically add new “Meetup” events to the Upcoming calendar each month and invite a set of people? And, FWIW, Meetin.org is another Meetup alternative which I came across. (It’s free but has limited support for countries outside of the US or Canada.)
Ryan | April 20th, 2005 @ 9:21 am |
Matt, you were saying something about Ruby on Rails. Hmmmmm… sounds like a good time to use it!
Dante | April 21st, 2005 @ 5:20 pm |
Ruby on Rails + PHP + Responsible JavaScript = yum! Sounds like a holy trinity for a site like meetup.com.
Maura | April 30th, 2005 @ 3:04 pm |
I prefer suretomeet.com over upcoming.org. It uses cookies, so you don’t have to register and log in to RSVP, though you can. As an organizer of a Meetup group and activist in my community, I’ve learned that you have to make things really easy for people. Upcoming.org doesn’t make it very clear to people who are not logged in that they even can RSVP. Suretomeet.com also generates a script for you to add an event calendar to your website, though it posted events that I had deleted (experiments) when I tried it. For ideas like these, news of developments and more, check out my blog about free alternatives to Meetup.com at http://freemeetup.blogspot.com.
Matthew Martin | April 30th, 2005 @ 3:26 pm |
Look no further, write (almost) no code. Wordpress *is* an alternative to meetup.com. Check out my site. Many other people are already using Wordpress as a calendar for their group (by using future posts) and using the comments as a way to RSVP. You can even use the wordpress user registration to let new members join and post their own events.
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Webguy | May 24th, 2005 @ 9:29 am |
Hi Friends,
Please try out http://www.MeetupXP.com , it’s actually based on moodle, but I’ve modified it a bit to make it work for groups and meetups. I’ve just opened it for beta, and I’ll need some people to try it out before it goes live, so do check it out.
It’s at http://www.meetupxp.com