So, Mr. Shirky mentioned Meetup.com in the last 50 pages. I considered his description of this web 2.0 application to be the most interesting reading in those pages.
Meetup (this was discussed in class early on) is a social networking site that is meant to be used for physical meeting arrangements. Facebook is meant to just serve as a way of electronically communicating with "friends," but Meetup, they want you to actually see these "friends." I'm somewhat surprised Facebook didn't just create a subsection of their site devoted to arrange meet ups. But, in actuality, they did. Well, not specifically, but you can certainly create a physical event and invite others to join in.
So, something is different. It might be that this capability stretches beyond what facebook users want to accompish during their time on the site. Or maybe meetup.com is just more user-friendly. Or maybe facebook is just too mainstream. Their typical users don't need an electronically generated event to meet up with people they associate with. This is, as Mr. Shirky elaborates, not the case for Xena (warrior princess) fans or the rare witches of the world.
Some groups are much less populated than others and these groups are the ones that need the help of the computer to gather their few members together. Many popular groups don't have to make very specific plans to meet up with their fellow members, or they may not even feel that their common characteristic is rare enough to enjoy sharing it with the other members. Either way, a quick glance at meetup.com shows that the majority of groups communicating through this medium are groups of people we hardly ever just "come across." Frankly, I am happy for all of them.
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