Steve Rosenbaum over at OnMedia writes a post entitled Why Facebook Should Buy Meetup in which he says in part:
Consider Meetup. While Silicon Valley has tripped over itself to fund Facebook applications, Meetup has been disciplined in its mission to keep its core product entirely about real face to face human interactions. The web site, which has all kinds of natural Social Network hooks remains primarily a place for information about, and connection to real world physical events.
Virtual connections drive a need for human connections. The web doesn't replace human to human engagement - it fosters it. Yes, Facebook rocks. And the evolution of vertical communities is just getting started.
I think what Steve is saying is that virtual connections reinforce and make easier the management of real-world connections as well as the discovery of new connections both virtual and real world. But I didn't see the argument in Steve's piece why Facebook should buy Meetup.
While Facebook's mission is to connect individuals so that they can build their social graphs and leverage them, their primary mission is connect individuals virtually. Meetup has superb social linking tools already built in to their web presence to enable effective RT meet ups. While the synergies are indeed natural, I don't think the Facebook crowd considers real world meetups as core to its business strategy. In fact, I'm not sure what they consider their business strategy to be as of yet. I do think they hare completely focused on a B2C play when in fact there is much that could be done to blow the doors off the enterprise space.
