I went to my first Meetup last night, I think the New York Tech Meetup was a good venue for my first web instantiated real world activity. The forum was for 5 new ideas to be presented to the group (~350 people). A good crowd was on hand, it was good to get there early even though the event started late. The good seats filled quickly. I'm not really up on who's who in the internet world -- that's why I'll be attending more groups like this, but sitting next to me were Esther Dyson and Robert Tolmach. I am sure the room was littered with names I should know.

The presenters:

1) VentBox - A social site dedicated to finding people who think George Bush is a weenie. The highlight was when the founder described that he wanted to build a 'Swiss Army Knife' system on the web -- tons of attachment none of which are the best tool for the intended job.

2) Gatsb - A flickr meets twitter mobile phone picture geo tagging thingy - Scott tried very hard to excite the developer about his own product.

3) Mouse and the OLPC - 2 Mouse employees and two High School kids have had a chance to play with the OLPC and start thinking about global support for these devices -- what a great platform Meetup is for a socially conscious technocentric community to encourage the next generation.

4) Houseparty.com - 5 stars for having a real business model -- this company is off the ground and running - not sure why he demo'd something that is already a live and vital business, perhaps a warmup for doing a VC run.

5) Hitchsters.com - One suit and a sidekick - neither of which knew what platform or codebase their 'Idea' was built on.

Then came announcements. I like announcements, as a new person to the group it let me see who was looking for talent, who was looking for ideas, and who was selling things. Scott Heiferman event organizer and founder of Meetup said he is doing away with announcements because there was obviously too many. Here is my idea -- charge people for a mention, and give them a table in the back. In between each presenter Scott can read two sentences about each vendor. I love going to expo hall at conventions and will gladly stop by the tables after the event to talk with the 'vendors'.