The major changes affected the way Meetup pages look and made it possible for non-organizers to schedule meetups. Some of the changes made organizers feel like Meetup had taken some of the control over the groups they had carefully cultivated, sometimes for years. Users complained that the copy Meetup inserted into the welcome email ("Don't flake") was rude and the new interface was harder for organizers who don't know HTML, but they were most upset about the fact that they weren't consulted or warned that changes were coming.

Although the official response was at first slow, Meetup is obviously scrambling to address the concerns coming from its most passionate users. Chief Technology Officer Greg Whalin just put up a long post apologizing for the missteps, admitting some mistakes ("We brought back roles and titles to the RSVP list. These should never have been removed, and honestly, it was a bit of an oversight that they disappeared"), detailing some of the many corrections Meetup made to its comprehensive redesign and outlining some of the changes the company is still working on. Additionally, Meetup plans to keep its users in the loop on changes going forward on the blog and in the Meetup forum.

"Thanks for all your feedback," he wrote. "I'm sorry that the last week was bumpy and painful for some folks out there. That was certainly not our intention, and we are doing everything we can as quickly as we can to help resolve some of this pain."

Can we just say we totally called this?

Check out 10 New York Meetups that Sound Amazing >>

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The big news for angry organizers who wanted their old site back is that Meetup is listening to users and will be making changes to the redesign. 

"Over the weekend, our team has been assessing the feedback and stats and will soon start rolling out improvements based on the feedback," wrote Heiferman.

He also took time to reply to a few specific rumors about the redesign, although he stopped short of issuing a full apology. 

We are not getting paid by Google for use of their maps.

We are listening. The fact that less than 2% of Organizers have posted here, does not make us value the feedback any less.

The new functionality gives Organizers the option to allow people to contribute more actively. There are legitimate concerns about of spam and other risks of openness, and they will continually be addressed, but we started Meetup with a belief that "people are generally good", and it has served us well so far. Organizers can turn off the ability for members to schedule Meetups.

Facebook, with its 600 million users, can afford to piss people off. Meetup, on the other hand, lives and dies by the folks who are engaged enough to put together a group, curate a page and arrange outside events.

As co-founder Matt Meeker told The Observer this morning, the company found that increasing the dues organizers had to pay actually improved engagement. "It meant that the people running the Meetups has some real skin in the game, and we found they were more active and committed," said Meeker. 

But a lot of Meetup organizers felt the redesign undermined their hard work. An organizer wrote The Observer to say that he was never warned a change was coming to the site. He had already planned out a year of meetings for his group and the redesign stripped out photos and text he spent hours building into his page's schedule.

"They’ve been defensive, arrogant and not very helpful in a practical sense," this organizer wrote. "An apology would have gone a long way to ease tensions."

Check out 10 New York Meetup groups that sound amazing >> 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Any time a popular web service undergoes a major redesign, there is a loud and angry response from unhappy users who liked the old version better.

Often a small but vocal minority can make a big stink. It's the power user paradox. The folks who do the most to drive a site, to evangelize it and help it grow, are also the ones who feel the most possessive, and react the most aggressively when the site is changed. 

Take Ray, a meetup members since 2006 and group organizer. "I am certainly not going to continue paying for a group of arrogant developers to mess up my content and layout just because they fancy playing about with their software!" he wrote in the Meetup forums. "It is MY GROUP and I want to have control or, at the very least, be consulted before changes are made. 

The introduction of a “New Meetup” has resulted in thousands of such comments on the site’s forums and the creation of Facebook groups like “Screw Meetup” dedicated to attacking the change.

"If this layout does not change I will cancel my subscription," Boston user Michael_Bourque posted on Meetup's forum. "...Now my site looks horrible. The older design was much better."

Check out 10 New York Meetup groups that sound amazing >>

So who does the site belong to? Power users revolts can be costly, as in the case of Digg, which saw its traffic fall off a cliff after a redesign that reduced the influence of power users in favor of reaching a general audience. 

On Meetup.com, the power users are the organizers and according to CEO Scott Heiferman, “The vast majority of revenue comes from organizer dues.”

In the new redesign, ordinary users can arrange for events, leading some to declare that organizers have been downgraded to moderators.

Of course, less than 1 percent of organizers active on Meetup have complained or commented on the redesign, but a small yet vocal minority is all it takes. Articles on the controversy have appeared on major blogs like Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb.  

Meetup co-founder Matt Meeker empathizes with organizers but notes that for many of the complaints there is a simple solution. “If they don’t like users organizing events, they can just turn it off. It's a feature organizers have full control over.”

Dawn Barber, a co-founder of the NY Tech Meetup, says organizers should embrace the wisdom of the crowd. “We have 16,000 members in our Meetup, and I think that is the result of opening the organization up to our members.”

Andres Glusman, a VP for Strategy at Meetup, says the company is evaluating the new changes to see what works and what doesn't. "As we see how people are using the new tools we will keep iterating to simplify and improve the experience."

Check out 10 New York Meetup groups that sound amazing >>

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

They're calling it "New Meetup," and more than 1,000 people have RSVP'ed to a secretive event at Irving Plaza.

The coming of "New Meetup" means the site you see today could soon be referred to as "Old Meetup."

And Meetup is old--about nine years old in fact. Meetup is like the grandfather of the New York tech scene, and that's how cofounder Matt Meeker talks.

Back in Mr. Meeker's day, when Meetup was just getting started, the internet was a vastly different place.

The memory of the dot-com bubble's spectacular burst was still fresh in investors' minds. Top-tier technical talent could be had on Craigslist for promises of equity. There were no lightweight programming languages and if you needed data from another company, you had to get your business development people on the phone with their business development people. You couldn't start a social network or a daily deal site for less than $10,000; you needed $250,000.

Startup kids have it so easy these days.

Meetup.com: Origins

It was 2001. Mr. Meeker had just left a startup that had been given $15 million to build a credit card-sized e-reader for email and text messages.

At the time, SMS was only available within networks; AT&T customers could only text other AT&T customers.

The company might have been doomed from the start. "I remember seeing some people sending emails around about this thing called a BlackBerry," Mr. Meeker said last night.

He was speaking at the Inside the Founder's Studio Meetup, held at Meetup's headquarters in SoHo, telling the story of how he and Scott Heiferman ended up starting a website that was social before social -- and websites -- were cool.

Well, websites had sort of been cool. "Classmates.com, I think that was the hot thing," Mr. Meeker said, laughing.

Classmates.com survived the tech crash and the recession at the beginning of the aughts, but many startups didn't. Mr. Meeker's $15 million company went bust without ever releasing a product; he kept going to the office for a while before he realized it was time to move on.

He started getting coffee with Scott Heiferman, with whom he'd worked at the online ad agency i-traffic, and the two started talking about startup ideas. They had lots; Mr. Meeker remembers a plan for a high-end, luxury set restaurant that only served breakfast cereal. "We actually went really far with that one," he said.

But they kept coming back to Meetup, and there were two major reasons why. One was Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's book about the collapse of community in America. The other was that something had changed in New York: Strangers had started saying hello. It was after September 11, and people seemed suddenly aware of each other. There was a yearning for community, Mr. Meeker said. Meetup.com was needed.

Startup mode

So Mr. Meeker and Mr. Heiferman raised some money from friends and parents and set about looking for a technical cofounder. They found the perfect guy: a talented developer who fit the company culture they wanted Meetup to have. He said no.

They persisted. He said okay, but he needed six months to do a consulting gig in Paris. They begged him. He changed it to three months. They followed him to Newark Airport and pitched him as he waited for his flight. When it was clear he intended to get on the plane, they bought tickets and joined him. They stayed with him in Paris for three weeks, talking about the design for Meetup. He said okay, I'm in.

Success! Mr. Meeker and Mr. Heiferman flew back to the States to prepare for the launch of Meetup. But soon, they got a phone call from Paris. Their would-be technical cofounder wanted another week. Fine, they said -- after all that! -- we'll find someone else.

To Craigslist! Mr. Meeker and Mr. Heiferman put up an ad for a technical cofounder. "The ad was obnoxious, it was rude, it was all wrong," Mr. Meeker said. But this was still post-bubble times, and they got 400 resumes. They whittled it down to 60, and started interviewing candidates -- one per hour.

"I took a page of notes for each one. I had a legal pad and I literally wrote a page of notes for every one," Mr. Meeker said. "For Peter, I just wrote 'Peter K. -- great.'"

That was Peter Kamali. Mr. Meeker and Mr. Heiferman ran Kamali through a gauntlet of interviews with their technical advisors. "The CTO of Barnes and Noble said, 'You should hire him, because if you don't, I will. He knows things he shouldn't know,'" Mr. Meeker remembered.

Building Meetup

It was March, and it was time to move. Mr. Meeker and Mr. Heiferman scared up a round of angel funding, which closed thanks to the release of a hot new device that everyone was trying to get their hands on. Mr. Meeker bought some of these devices -- the company that made them had just opened a store in New York -- and called up investors who had been giving him the runaround.

I have an iPod loaded with music, he said. I'll bring it to you wherever you are if you give me the check.

Success again! Money in hand, Mr. Meeker asked his new cofounder how long it would take to launch the site.

June 13, Mr. Kamali said.

Meetup.com launched on June 12.

The launch was a near-immediate success, thanks to a clever marketing campaign cooked up by Mr. Heiferman. Meetup scoured the internet for groups--Yahoo groups, blogs (they were called "weblogs" back then) for pug lovers, beer lovers, Wiccans, hockey moms, the works. They sent out emails notifying these groups of an upcoming made-up holiday--International Pug Lovers Meetup Day and International Witches Meetup Day, for example--and instructed them to go to the website to find out where to meet in their cities. "We got back a very enthusiastic response," he said. "People were like, 'Great! Thanks for letting me know!'" Today, there are 40,772 members of 194 Pug Meetup groups around the world.

Then Mr. Meeker told the story that every new Meetup employee hears on his or her first day.

"Join your local Howard Dean Meetup"

It was 2004, and an uppity low-level employee named Will, 23, was nagging Mr. Meeker about pitching Meetup groups centered around politics. No, Mr. Meeker told him repeatedly. The youngster, his efforts frustrated, went outside to have a cigarette and read The New York Times, which carried an article about a fiery Democrat from Vermont who was running for president: Howard Dean. Will promptly went inside and called the governor's office for a meeting. Then he asked Mr. Meeker for money for a train ticket.

After presumably chewing his young employee out for insubordination, Mr. Heiferman joined Will to meet with Mr. Dean, and his advisor Joe Trippi to talk about how the governor might make use of this new website. The men connected immediately, each side impressed by the other's mission. "We have no money, we have no organization," Mr. Dean said. "But if you will support me I will say 'join your local Howard Dean Meetup' after every speech."

Of course, Mr. Dean's campaign took off at the grassroots level in an unprecedented way. He lost the nomination, but he's credited for pioneering the use of the internet for grassroots political organizing. The deluge of press won Meetup national attention. By April 2004, the site had more than 1 million members.

#NewMeetup

Meeker left Meetup in 2008. He's now the entrepreneur-in-residence at Dogpatch Labs, an incubator backed by Polaris Ventures that sponsors 15 companies at a time, giving them free space and mentorship with no strings attached -- no stakes, no "first look" promises. He's bullish on the New York tech scene. "It's in exactly the right place," he said. "I don't think it's a bubble. The companies leading the way are real companies with real revenues."

One of those companies is Meetup, now nine years old and still going strong with 7.2 million members. Mr. Heiferman, now CEO, said at the January New York Tech Meetup (the largest organization in the New York tech scene, with more than 15,000 members) that 2010 was the company's first profitable year--revenue comes from the fees organizers pay to start groups. "And we did it without losing our souls," he added.

But Meetup's story isn't over, and on Monday we'll find out what the next phase of its history will be.

Meanwhile, check out 10 New York Meetups that Sound Amazing.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The site, founded by Scott Heiferman in 2002, is not as sexy as Foursquare or as hyped-up as Twitter. But Meetup was a social network before social networks were cool, and it's still going strong--which is more than a lot of proto-social networks can say.

In fact, 2010 was Meetup's first profitable year. "And we did it while keeping our soul," Heiferman said at the January New York Tech Meetup. Meetup is again embracing its slogan, "Use the Internet to get off the Internet," which was retired from the site in 2009, and the words now appear in subway ads across the city.

Meetup recently announced its group buying initiative, Meetup Perks, which will allow business to offer deals to specific Meetups. But the site has more changes in store.

A mysterious event on January 24 in Irving Plaza will mark the unveiling of the "new Meetup." Already 580 people have RSVP'ed, but the event will also be streamed live. "New big stuff," Heiferman teased on Twitter. The dresscode is specified as "future."

New big stuff--hm. Could it be a location-based app? Meetup Video Chat? Meetup Questions? A phone?

Most likely, the announcement will be a snazzy redesign. With such a publicized event, Meetup better hope its users like the redesign (or whatever it is). Devout users don't always react well to big changes--remember the day Digg died?

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The site is creating a self-serve platform so businesses can source deals to groups of potential customers. 

Say you're a computer supply store. Now you can use Meetup Perks to easily create a deal and offer it to the 16,000 members of the New York Tech Meetup. 

Facebook recently created a similar self-serve feature, Deals, that it hopes to match with its Groups site.

But Meetup has a big advantage over Facebook: large, organic communities that have formed around offline activities. 

bpopper at observer dot com - @benpopper 

During the four-day trip, the executives met with, among other officials, General Nasier Abadi, Iraqi Armed Forces’ vice chief of staff; Marc Wall, coordinator for economic transition in Iraq; and Ralph Steen, officer in charge of the national fiber network installation project. Outside of the Green Zone, they wore military helmets and flak jackets and met local Iraqi leaders. They sat at roundtables with elite students from the University of Technology and the University of Baghdad to discuss how they use Facebook and which videos they like on YouTube. After coffee and tea with the deputy prime minister, Twitter’s Mr. Dorsey convinced him to start his own account on the microblogging platform. He could use his iPhone to update the page.

“The goal was really to listen and see if there was a way we could help, go there and come up with a list of things that we could do in a matter of weeks, not years,” Mr. Liebman, the Howcast executive, told The Observer in a phone interview after his return to New York.

The delegation confronted a myriad of connectivity problems in Iraq. Power grids are on the fritz. Only about 5 percent of homes have Internet access, according to the group, and although an estimated 80 percent of the population own mobile phones, infrastructure is crippling under the demand.

“We were on the phone with the deputy prime minister before we met him and the phone [call] dropped five, six times,” Mr. Liebman said.

The group was escorted by a security team, and “always felt safe,” according to Mr. Liebman, but with suicide bombings a not-infrequent occurrence, everyday safety is a constant concern for Iraqi citizens; reliable phone and Internet connections are vital to their daily lives.

Mr. Heiferman returned to his Meetup office last week to a sign hanging in his office that his coworkers made. It read: “Mission Accomplished.” But there is still lots of work to do.

“They’ve got real issues,” Mr. Heiferman said about Iraq. “Some say, ‘How do you think about Internet infrastructure when you need a sanitation infrastructure? How can you think about Internet connectivity when there isn’t clean water?’ And that’s very valid. But it’s not a matter of either/or. There’s parts of the rebuilding effort that can look at different things.”

The delegation—the first of its kind—was organized by Jared Cohen, the 27-year-old Stanford graduate who became the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2006. “We all know the story of challenges in Iraq,” Mr. Cohen explained during a digital video conference with State Department reporters last Wednesday. “We’ve been hearing that story for a while. But increasingly, we’ve been hearing stories and reporting from our embassy and elsewhere about opportunities, in particular with regard to technology. So we had been exploring ways that we can embrace those trends and leverage those trends to try to look for new opportunities to use technology to support our objectives in Iraq.”

During the trip, the group used a Twitter hashtag (#iraqtech) and worked on a sharable document (using Google Docs, of course), according to Mr. Liebman, to chronicle the ways in which they may be able to help—from training government officials on using online tools to foster transparency to teaching students how to use Twitter.

On April 21, the group got a tour of the Iraq National Museum, which recently reopened and has become an important symbol for both government and citizens for their history and culture. They met with Faeza Al Ubadi, the museum’s chief engineer, who is trying to build a Web site for the institution. “He was talking about things like Norton AntiVirus and all these things just to get email up, and we were like, ‘O.K., you can use Google Apps. It’s free, it takes two seconds, you don’t need to build your whole email server, right?” Mr. Liebman said. They plan on helping Mr. Al Ubadi build a robust Web site for the museum. One of their goals is to educate Iraqis on the free platforms, from Google to YouTube, that are already available to them.

The group also hopes to organize a delegation of Iraqi government officials and community leaders for a visit to Silicon Valley, and possibly New York’s tech community. They are also brainstorming ideas for an online, centralized information portal for Iraqi citizens, according to Mr. Liebman. “We’ll have more announcements in a few months,” he said.

“Someone on my team, at Meetup, they were kind of skeptical of the trip,” Mr. Heiferman told the Observer. “And they said, ‘Wow, so this is just America doing some sort of cultural imperialism on this country.’

“But the point of the trip wasn’t to bring some American Internet brand into the country; it’s about the raw piping for how people connect with each other in ways that just literally don’t compute if you’ve been in the Saddam dark ages for a bunch of decades,” Mr. Heiferman continued. “This isn’t bringing McDonald’s to Iraq. It’s bringing some of the rawest ideas of how technology helps them be more themselves.”

THE GROUP can’t necessarily build Internet infrastructure in Iraq with their own hands, but they can spark another important initiative—using the Internet to empower the Iraqi people.

“This is one of the most exciting areas of conflict-resolution work going on today,” said Sheldon Himelfarb, who specializes in technology and media tactics for post-conflict peace-building and development for the D.C.-based United States Institute of Peace. “What this medium is allowing them to do is get a sense of confidence, connection with the rest of the world, and not only connection with the rest of the world but communities in their own countries.”

Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who chronicles new-media and technology advances in the Middle East on his blog, Abu Aardvark, describes a “total free-for-all, new-media space” for young people to build upon. “It [is] more about them themselves and forming ideas, forming relationships, trying to figure out ways of engaging with a society that seemed to have no place for them,” Mr. Lynch said during a discussion last week at the Open Society Institute titled “The Political Impact of New Media in the Middle East.” “The new ideas, the fact that they become different kinds of citizens, empowered in different ways and with different expectations of each other, of their government, of other societies”—this is what could make a major change in the Middle East.

As far as the Iraqi government’s commitment to building a stronger tech infrastructure and understanding the power of the Web, Mr. Heiferman said it “was a mixed bag” among officials. “Sometimes you’d think the commitment was there, and sometimes you’d think not, depending on who you’re talking to.”

There also seemed to be a cultural disconnect—most Iraqis aren’t hyped up on Twitter, for example. “There was comedy in seeing Jack Dorsey talk to a bunch of bearded 60-year-old Saddam-era Iraqis about how important it is to hear about your sister eating a sandwich,” he said.

“But we sort of take for granted how valuable Craigslist is for our lives and Google is for our lives and YouTube is for our lives," Mr. Heiferman said.

“Our whole purpose here is to listen and try to understand the way they kind of are looking at the possibility of investing in Internet infrastructure and having a discussion of the need that people have. We tried to explain the basic notion of having a private sector, the basic notion of being a democracy, and that the Internet will be increasingly vital if they’re going to participate in the larger world.”

greagan@observer.com