Thanks, Chris. I'm not familiar enough with groups.io to know how many people search for a group to join (vs. hearing about the group some other way). I'm wondering whether Groups.io could set up a really easy interface, Meetup-style, for people to create a local group and other people to find it -- without needing to know anything about keywords. The group owner creates a group and gives its location by filling in a few boxes: city, state/province/region, country, postal/ZIP code. Someone who wants to find a group fills in a similar few checkboxes -- and gets a list of groups. Maybe there's also a way to categorize the group -- to help people in big cities to quickly narrow their search.

Since Mark isn't working on new features now, I'll try not to post any more now, but I'd guess that other thoughts could be useful. If Meetup looks like it will really shut down, I hope this archived discussion might help Groups.io set itself up to take Meetup's place. In my two days on Groups.io, I've been really impressed with all of the features... some of them could make a Meetup-type group even more useful than Meetup.com allows.

Jerry