MEETin.org

» see meetin.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

meetin.org is still up, and it is one page long: a logo above a blue box saying the previous website was shut down on April 4th, 2021, after seventeen years of events and, in a few cases, weddings and children. It undersold itself by a year. The site opened on 14 March 2003, which makes eighteen, and nobody writing a farewell note counts carefully.

Mikey Heard started it in Washington, DC, as a Yahoo Group, to get people in one city to meet each other in person. The DC group got busy enough that he built a real website for it, and sixteen more American chapters followed, several of which stayed the largest ones for the rest of its life. At its widest it covered around ninety cities and carried over ninety thousand members.

Everything about it was free. Joining cost nothing, events had no fees or dues, and members were barred from organizing anything they could profit from, in money or in goods. It was explicitly designed not to be a dating service. This is one I only ever knew from the outside, and the reason is structural: a network of city chapters is worth exactly what your own city's chapter is worth, and the chapters that mattered were the American ones, starting with the Washington group that started everything.

~ the record ~

~ the rules ~

MEETin had a doctrine and it published it. The site called it the Vibe, and the point of the Vibe was that you could show up without the pressure of business networking or, in its own phrasing, pick-up scenes. Any member could post an event and two members could co-host one. Local volunteers ran each chapter unpaid, and interest groups formed underneath them for film nights and book clubs.

That set of rules is most of the reason it lasted eighteen years on a budget that would not have covered one engineer. It is also why it has no acquisition story: a volunteer network with no revenue has nothing anybody buys. The Washington Post wrote it up in June 2007 and Business Week followed three days later, both working the same angle, which was that social networking had started happening offline again.

~ how it actually ended ~

The FAQ that went up alongside the tombstone is unusually direct about cause of death. Hosting was paid for out of donations and only donations. Activity and new memberships had been dropping sharply for years, which the operators put partly down to aging technical infrastructure and to what people had come to expect from a website. Fewer members meant fewer donations, and they wrote that the shutdown is simply due to our running out of funds.

What they did next is the part worth keeping. They decided against asking for more money and wound the site down instead. The announcement went up in March 2021, the site closed on 4 April, and what remained moved to a Facebook page that the administrators described in the FAQ as a convenience and specifically not an endorsement of Facebook. Several cities, they added, had been more active in their Facebook group than on meetin.org for years.

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