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

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

Mr. Glocer explained to the 50 or so attendees that newspapers like The New York Times have to cut costs by concentrating on their strongest coverage. "That view that 'I am The New York Times and I do everything'—I think that's not the best way to run a newspaper," he said.

Here's how Mr. Glocer sees news in the future: "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No. How about The New York Times on Israel, FT"—that would be The Financial Times—"on Germany and France, which is really good, ESPN on sports and other smaller things coming together on a style sheet every morning?"

But would people pay for it? "People will pay for quality journalism," he said, "whether through micropayments or regular, boring subscription plans."

Mr. Glocer said his company is comfortable reinventing itself. Besides Reuters' reputation for breaking news dispatches, more than 40 percent of its revenue comes from foreign exchange and treasury trading services. Until 1970, he said, Reuters never made more than about $100 million a year. Today, it's a $13.5 billion company because they were "getting out of provisional news gathering, like stop being like the AP and other press, and realizing there was value in information from professionals in their work, whether it was bankers, lawyers and accountants and health care professionals."

According to a Forbes.com "Faces in the News" profile of Mr. Glocer, when he came on as chief executive in July 2001, he got Reuters to start tailoring new products for traders and asset managers, providing specialist information on fixed-income securities, derivatives and currency markets.

At the Meetup, he discussed Twitter, saying, "I think if you hooked up Einstein to Twitter, it'd be garbage, too." He also explained why he switched from LinkedIn to Facebook for business networking: "Every asshole who wanted a job was pestering me on LinkedIn and nobody interesting was coming to me." Mr. Glocer also emphasized the need for financial companies' to move into more transparent practices and release real-time data sets, instead of quarterly or yearly reports. "Even when it's down to press releases and Webcasts, it's really all about a bunch of people inside the walls of a company, a corporation pretending that they have some control over what gets out and a bunch of people on the other side, interpreting the official flow, and then most of the art is saying how that's bullshit," he said.

"What if we stopped this charade that people like me pretend to be in control of the timing, and to some extent, the content of my business, and instead release a real-time flow of information?"

Certainly, that will change the game for financial reporters. "I mean, what are good journalists?" he continued. "For good journalists, their job in company reporting is essentially to find out stuff that companies don't want to release outside of their normal cycles or templates, and get that information faster."

According to Mr. Grocer, the evolution of news will be a slow process. "I've met a lot of smart people in my life, and they're the ones who are eventually always right and they always know where things are going [and] they always underestimate friction in the world and how long it takes to get there."

"Since we're still human beings, living in a friction-filled world, it'll take at least 10 years for the media cycle to catch up," he said.

He was responding to Sanford Dickert, a tech consultant and strategist who worked on projects including Twitter Vote Report, which used social media to aggregate reports on conditions and wait lines at polling stations last November. Mr. Dickert was discussing a similar project his is working on, called New York Taxi Report, and expressing his frustration with the government’s unwillingness to open up stats and numbers that other groups might find useful—like 311 reports. “There are internal constraints, both legal and political strains, to get them to do what you want them to do,” he said.

Mr. Rasiej said the group had to come to a decision: either they use their tech savvy skills and become a "guerilla organization" that creates programs and web-based applications to show government the power of existing data, “and wait for them to catch up with us.” Or they lobby the government to operate with a more open data policy. “I think the latter is a waste of time,” Mr. Rasiej said.

The goal of the Open Government NYC Meeup, according to head organizer Matt Cooperrider, was to bring together everyone working on Government 2.0 initiatives in the city and suss out who is working on what—and maybe pool their efforts. After sipping Brooklyn Brewery beers and munching on cheese and cookies, about 40 of the attendees tried to figure out how they could help—from creating Twitter feeds for each New York City subway line and setting up platforms for crowd-sourced reports to explaining to politicians exactly why open data is so important.

Many, including Austin Osmer, campaign manager for Rev. Billy Tallen, who is running for mayor against Michael Bloomberg on an open data platform, called for the city to open up data culled from 311. In early March, City Council speaker Christine Quinn and Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who chairs the Committee on Technology in Government, proposed that the administration create a mobile 311 application so citizens could get quick, basic information, like school closings, and report on local crimes and potholes from their iPhones or BlackBerry devices. But, if Ms. Quinn truly wanted to “eliminate the middleman” as she said, one Personal Democracy Forum blogger said, she’d have to give the raw data to the public so they can decide what kind of connections and displays will be useful for them. It’s not about PDFs and iPhone applications, it’s about the numbers, stats and reports behind the government-curated graphics.

Mr. Rasiej said that “it’s not her you need to get to, it’s her policy makers” like Paul Cosgrave, the city’s commissioner of the department of information technology and telecommunications, and local city council members.

“There are government people who want to do better, but they don’t know how,” added Rachael Fauss, research and policy associate at Citizens Union, an independent organization that promotes good government and political reform. Ms. Fauss previously worked as former legislative director for Assemblywoman Barbara Clark. She encouraged the high-tech coders in the room to educate their politicians. “It’s really worth it to teach them and help them understand what the problem is,” she said. “Otherwise, nothing is going to change.”

Mr. Rasiej has been consulting Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith on making Albany more open and transparent through technology. Besides introducing Andrew Hoppin as a candidate for the chief information officer position, he has been working with Andrew Stengel, senior policy advisor for government reform, on a YouTube channel, created on Feb. 20, called NYSenateRulesReform, to help foster public participation in the Temporary Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Reform’s hearings and testimonies. According to the YouTube page, the group “has been charged with undertaking a thorough review of the how the Senate conducts its business, and with making recommendations to increase openness, fairness and accountability, and a more participatory and transparent legislative process.”

Mr. Rasiej also suggested that Mr. Smith hire a new communications director who is familiar with social networking tools—like Twitter—to connect with constituents.

These changes are part of a momentum, Mr. Rasiej told the Observer in a recent interview, to change the way the state government has operated for the past three decades by making it more transparent and efficient with technology.

Louis Klepner, who works on CivicID.org and the NYC Community Fiber Project, which aims to bring stronger broadband connectivity to the city, said the tech savvy folks in the room should break out of their inner circles and become more visible to local government. He said he attended a city council meeting about open government and broadband access, and he was one of only five people there. “One thing that we have en masse is our mass,” he said. “We need to use it.”