Comment by ankurnagpal89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ankurnagpal89 | Hacker News Reader

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(Disclaimer: I am the author of the article)

I disagree - I believe people have an intimate enough relationship with certain meetup groups that they work as a micro-social network. To that end, it would make logical sense to have an independent application for those groups.

With that said, this strategy would not be an alternative to having a central Meetup.com application - this strategy would work in conjunction primarily to leverage the additional app store SEO boost from having thousands of unique titles. Each individual application would link right back to Meetup.com's primary application and people would have to sign up for a Meetup.com account in order to use it.

With that said, there are shortcomings to this approach. This empowers group organizers a little more than Meetup.com would ideally like and might work better for companies that white-label their services.

I still don't doubt that it will greatly increase raw traffic numbers - but maybe thats not what their priority is at the moment.

>"I disagree - I believe people have an intimate enough relationship with certain meetup groups that they work as a micro-social network. To that end, it would make logical sense to have an independent application for those groups."

But what does that do for meetup.com, except cut themselves off completely from the very communities they're trying to foster?

>"to leverage the additional app store SEO boost from having thousands of unique titles."

You only get the "SEO boost" if people are actually looking for terms on a search engine. You're still assuming that people are actually looking for local interest group on the app store. I really don't think so.

If anyone were serious about it, one could run a quick survey and ask where users would search if they wanted to find a local group to talk about shared interests. I'd be surprised if more than 1 in 500 said anything like "app store".

>" still don't doubt that it will greatly increase raw traffic numbers"

I feel like a jerk, now, and I don't mean to be, but I also have to disagree here. I don't see how cutting Meetup out of the equation amounts to more traffic for Meetup.com.

I think the fundamental difference between our points of view is that I am attributing traffic on each individual application to be contributing to Meetup.com's traffic.

Each individual application is still owned by Meetup, it runs their application binary executing their advertisements, running on their payment processing, cross-promoting whatever content it is that they want to promote - what difference does it make if the application is called New York Tech instead of Meetup.com?

I think one difference is that they will recommend New York Tech to their tech friends, rather than recommend a general system for meeting people with shared interests to all of their friends.

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