Meeting minds

So Meetup.com have started charging group owners a monthly fee, much to the dismay of its unsuspecting users. Metroblogging, a group blog network of which I'm an author (on the London site), is cancelling plans to collaborate with Meetup forthwith.

How about actually talking with and listening to your community, guys? When people start to build a web service into the fabric of their lives, their identity mingles with that of the service—and vice-versa. It's hardly surprising users feel angry when treated as mere units in a cashflow spreadsheet.

My one experience of dealing with Meetup.com is sending a request for a "#joiito IRC" topic (within Meetup's centrally-administered and hierachical topic directory—no tagging here!) for all the people who hang out on the #joiito freenode IRC channel. They never did reply...