[chipfunk]

I'm also a frequent user of meetup.com. I've found that the likelihood of forming lasting connections varies wildly based on how the events are run and on what types of people are targeted. I've made quite a few of my closest friends through the site, and I've noticed that the more successful groups from a friendship perspective tend to be the ones that recur frequently (weekly) or the ones where there is some kind of strong and relatively rare commonality between the participants outside of career, age group, relationship status, etc.

Either way, meetup.com is just a platform for hosting and discovering these events. There's not much that makes meetup groups inherently different from other types of clubs/organizations. It's up to the organizers and the attendees to actually make the events worthwhile.