So meetup have now purged 129,570 "frozen" groups [1] from their system. They now have 58,915 groups, although some of those are still what they refer to as "inactive" [2].
Personally I think it's a shame they've gone this route, as now a new group can't even start without an organiser to pay up front. At $19/month that's quite an amount for what is mostly a mailing service.
I note that there are now only 50 Perl groups registered, although only Franfurt is active in Europe ... with 1 member! How long before they purge inactive groups too?
[1] frozen = 5 or less members and no organiser.
[2] inactive = 6 or more members and no organiser.
The meetup thing was a really nice idea, I used it to help promote the Liverpool Java user group, but $19/month was really too much. I'm sure some groups would find it worthwhile, but I thought the concept worked largely because like CPAN it set a low barrier to entry, and allowed low budget, low commitment, low activity groups to exist until someone got interested enough to push them forward.
