New Meetup

Today we launched a major upgrade to the Meetup platform. We are calling it New Meetup.

Meetup Group home pages have a sleek new design. Meetups are front and center, with the Group’s latest activity below.



Along with the facelift, Meetup Groups now have new settings for scheduling and planning Meetups. Organizers can choose to enable members to: propose Meetups, build on other’s suggestions, help find places for Meetups and commit to attend Meetups while they’re still ‘in the making’. There are lots of options. Organizers can choose the level of involvement they want and expect from Meetup Group members. If the leadership team for the Meetup Group would rather plan all the Meetups, Organizers may choose to disable Meetups ‘in the making’ under Group settings.

Today’s changes make it easier for members to contribute to the creation of Meetups in ways that are big & small. Learn more about the New Meetup on your Meetup Group’s home page or in our Help and Resources section here.

Mark is a Product Manager at Meetu

Announcing Meetup Perks!

Being a member of a Meetup Group has always had its privileges. Now, Organizers can sweeten the deal for their members with Meetup Perks.

Meetup Perks makes it simple for Meetup Groups to get ongoing discounts, deals and other great membership benefits from relevant businesses and organizations.


Here’s how it works:

  • Businesses and organizations offer really compelling Perks (e.g. 25% off yoga class, free meeting space & appetizers, 20% off bikes, etc) to relevant Meetup Groups based on topic and optionally location. These aren’t one-off deals. They are ongoing Perks that support local communities and earn loyal customers.

  • Organizers of active Meetup Groups that match the topic and location criteria will be notified up to once a day of new Perks available for their Meetup Groups.
  • The first Organizers who opt into an offer get to extend that Perk to their members — so if you want it, be sure to act quickly!

To be eligible for Perks offers, your Group needs to be active, and meeting up. You also need to be accepting Perk offers. Make sure your Meetup Group is setup to receive Perk offers now. Meetup Perks won’t affect existing sponsorships, or a Meetup Group’s ability to get their own.
 
If you’re in a business that wants to attract tons of loyal and passionate customers, get started with Meetup Perks now. The first 5,000 businesses to make an offer will have their Perk fees waived until March 15th, 2011.

Community is more powerful than ever — flex your muscle and spread the word!

Mike is a Product Manager at Meetup.

Updated attendance tool

We’ve updated the attendance tool to make it easier for Organizers to keep track of who came to a Meetup! Now, Organizers have:

1. A faster way to filter members by Attendance, RSVP or name

2. A new ‘Didn’t attend’ option that can be used to indicate excused absences

To check it out, simply click ‘Edit attendance’ on any past Meetup.

Matt is a Product Manager at Meetup.

No more ‘Maybe’ option for RSVPs

We’re doing away with the option to RSVP as ‘Maybe’ to a Meetup.

When it comes to managing expectations for your Meetup, moderating ‘Maybe’ respondents generally created more work for Organizers. Maybe RSVPs also had a tendency to overcomplicate things like waiting lists, and made it harder for Organizers who charge fees to attendees. As best we can tell, the majority of folks who RSVPed ‘Maybe’ never actually made it to their Meetups.

Meetup isn’t about maybe getting together sometime. It’s about actually building local communities that meet face-to-face in the real world. The more we thought about it, the more we realized that ‘Maybe’ didn’t really fit with what Meetup is all about.

How will this affect members?

Members who have already RSVPed ‘Maybe’ for an upcoming Meetup won’t have their RSVPs suddenly dropped or anything. And Meetups where someone has already RSVPed ‘Maybe’ will still allow folks to RSVP ‘Maybe’ for the time being. Going forward, allowing ‘Maybe’ will no longer be an option.

How will this affect Organizers?

For most members and Organizers, this won’t feel like much of a change — about two-thirds of Meetups have had the option to allow for ‘Maybe’ RSVPs turned off. Of the 4.2 million(!) RSVPs we looked at in the last two months, only about 5% of all RSVPs were ‘Maybe’.

For Organizers who have previously allowed for ‘Maybe’ RSVPs, we apologize for any inconvenience! We hope that simplifying the RSVP options will ultimately save you some time and cut down on flakiness.

Tegan is on Meetup’s Community team.

Add a date and time to your ideas for Meetups

Ideas for Meetups are a great way for groups to get more Meetups on their calendar and get members more active, engaged and excited.

Over the next few months we’ll be working on improving ideas to make them a bigger part of the Meetup experience. We hope these enhancements lead to more ideas being posted, more members working together to make GREAT ideas and more Meetups being created and attended.

Our first enhancement is letting members suggest a date and time for an idea.

Other updates we’ve made include commenting on ideas from the “all ideas” page and the ability to “like” individual comments.

We’ll be making more updates to ideas so stay tuned!

Thanks,

Davide, Justin, Keith, Mark, Nora, Steve A., Takashi and Teresa

Mark is a Product Manager at Meetup

Meetup for iPhone!

Now while you’re on the go, you can use your iPhone to connect with Meetup!


Some of the great things you can do with the Meetup for iPhone app:

  • Discover great new Meetups to attend
  • RSVP to upcoming Meetups
  • See who’s coming and view their profiles
  • Get directions fast using Google Maps and GPS
  • Write a comment about a Meetup
  • Take a photo and upload directly to the Meetup Album
  • Check-in to let others know you’ve arrived
  • And many more!

Follow this link to download Meetup iPhone directly from the Apple application store. Once installed run the app and log-in to Meetup.com. You will see a list of your upcoming Meetups. Tap on any Meetup to start using these great features or Find to discover great Meetups!

Meetup for iPhone uses Meetup’s API, which allows anyone in the community to build great Meetup-related apps for mobile or the web.

Thanks and stay mobile,
Mike D, Ivy, Nathan, Rich, Steven and Wayne

Get the Meetup app now!

Mike is a Product Manager at Meetup.

Post comments on ideas!

Hey folks! We’ve added a comments section to ideas.

In addition to liking an idea, group members can discuss an idea further. You could use the comments section to ask questions, round up volunteer event hosts, propose venues or dates and generally iron out the kinks in an idea before it becomes an actual Meetup.

Thanks!

Justin, Mark, Nora and Teresa

Mark is a Product Manager at Meetup.

New photo uploader

Today we are launching a brand new photo uploader for your Meetup photo albums! The original Java based photo uploader had issues with freezing, crashing, network timeouts, and was simply not reliable. The new uploader is based on a Flash application named SWFUpload and coupled with many other improvements, should make the entire process of uploading photos from your Meetups much less painful.

We also took this opportunity to increase the max you can upload at any one time from 50 to 500 photos (which is also the max number of photos per album).

Some things to remember:
1. Photo albums can have up to 500 photos
2. Photos are limited to 10MB and must be JPEG, GIF, or PNG format


Thanks!
Justin, Mark, Nora, Teresa

Mark is a Product Manager at Meetup.

Check-in to your Meetups

We’ve made it easy to let others know you’ve arrived at a Meetup! Today we added the ability for members to check-in to their Meetups. By checking-in you’re also making it easier for  members to see who’s there and find the group.

You can check-in and view checked-in members from the Meetup mobile site, the Meetup iPhone application, or one of the third-party Meetup apps that support check-ins.

Members who check-in to events are also noted as in attendance for the event so you’re also helping the organizer track attendance.

We’re just getting started with check-ins, in the future we’ll add the ability to share your Meetup check-in with others on services like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. Stay tuned!

Thanks and check you later,
Mike D, Ivy, Nathan, Rich and Steven

Mike is a Product Manager at Meetup.

Site polish and clean up

Last week we took a break from how we normally do product development and spent the entire week polishing up the existing site - everything from cleaning up copy to user interface tweaks to small enhancements. If it could be done in less than a day, we tackled it. 

Below are some of the 75 improvements that are currently live or will be live on the site in the next few days:

  • Added an ‘I did not attend’ option to the post-Meetup survey emails.
  • You can now have multiple Event Hosts.
  • Member profile pages now show which Meetup Groups a person organizes first, instead of an alphabetical sorted list.
  • Added ‘last-event-attended’ to the downloadable member spreadsheet.
  • Added ‘My profile’ to the ‘Members’ drop down in the group’s navigation.
  • We now show Waiting List counts wherever we show RSVP counts.
  • You can now filter your calendar on your member home page by ‘Wait Listed’.
  • For Organizers, we’ve re-ordered the venue list picker by most frequently used first. 
  • Any member of your group can now ‘Talk about this meetup’ before and after an event.
  • We removed the ‘haven’t rsvped yet’ list from the Meetup details page.
  • When different Organizers edit an event there will be a history of changes (not the changes themselves, but the times the changes were made). 
  • If there are dues, the ‘Pay Now’ button appears in the group information box (box in top left).
  • We’re adding ‘photo picker’ functionality anywhere you can edit with BBcode in the group context (message boards, meetup create page).
  • When creating a Meetup, you’ll be able to pick from any album for the Meetup photo.
  • Members can edit Meetup ratings from the Meetup details page.
  • All your groups will be accessible from any page on Meetup.com (as long as you’re logged in).

**Update**

  • Photos can be moved from one album to another in a Meetup Group.

Maya leads the Product Management team at Meetup.