Friendster and Meetup: Synergies

Somewhere around the blogosphere and the general internet ether, I'm sure that someone has thought of this idea and probably blogged the idea. Nonetheless, I will recklessly proceed. In getting very involved in setting up my Friendster profile today and simultaneously desperately trying to promote the Meetup for Pro-Choice New Yorkers, I became almost apoplectic with joy at the discovery of a new synthesis: Friendster + Meetup.

Here's the thing - in the Friendster profile, one defines one's location and one's interests. Those words in the interest section represent categories of a very lazy kind (lazy on Friendster's part). You can then do a search either on your own self-defined interests or plug a word into the search facility. Voila - a list of people, at least remotely connected to you, who share both geographic area and state of mind (at least in part). What does this have to do with Meetup you might ask? Well Friendster also has a tool for sending messages through their interface (no email addresses are thus visible) and if one was so inclined, one could send all of the people who share your interest in your given network an email about a meetup on that interest. For the less well-known and starter meetups, this could be a way of generating some buy-in. And once a Meetup has more than 5 members, all systems are go. So if you are faced with an as-of-yet unpopular Meetup and really want the thing to happen, sign up at Friendster and see what shakes out of the system for you. Of course, the Dean Meetup organizers need not apply (though this may be a good tactic for those outisde of major urban areas even for the Dean folks).