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I've used Meetup a ton, as an organizer and as a user, so I'm a little nostalgic about the good old days - but they've been over for some time.

I think EventBrite really put a dagger into Meetup five years ago or so, and proved that what customers actually want is not another social network but just a best-of-breed ticketing/booking/rsvp tool. I think Meetup tried for a while to pretend this was not the case, despite the evidence of groups fleeing their platform.

Interestingly, it's not just b/c organizers want to get paid. In my experience the only way to get people to reliably show up for an event is to get them to pay (even a nominal amount) and payments were just a bolted-on afterthought for Meetup.

I have some doubts that Facebook will come to dominate this niche, particularly when it comes to professional meetups/groups as many people keep their FB network and their professional network quite separate.