[jacobscott]

Does anyone have a good writeup somewhere of all such (public) groups? I trust HN pointers/analysis over just searching meetup. I'm relatively new to the valley, it would be nice to figure out what part of the technology social network I fit best with.

[iamelgringo]

A lot of it depends on what you're interested in. There are Meetup groups for most technologies out there: Rails, MySQL, LAMP. And, then there are Web 2.0 groups, "New Tech" meetups, general entrepreneur groups and business groups. Each one tends to have a focus and a slant. Some are sponsored, some aren't.

The Hackers and Founders group I host tends have about 1/3 to 1/2 of members read Hacker News on a regular basis. I'm also running it to simply build community. I'm not getting any financial return on the deal. I'm really just doing it to get to know other Hackers and Founders.

There are also non-Meetup.com groups like super happy dev house: http://superhappydevhouse.org/ and various and sundry Tech Crunch get-togethers, Digg parties, etc...

My advice would be to try a couple out. Worst case scenario, you're out a couple hours of your time.

[rtf]

When I got my game gig it was through demonstrating work at a Meetup group(San Francisco Game Developers), so I know this is a good place to start. I'm planning to show for as many of these events as I can.