A term for such an app discussed in the previous blogpost has been named as “Event-based social networks” (EBSN) in a paper written by Xingjie Liu et. al. in 2012. They are here defined as a service that offers both online and offline social interactions.
One of the social networks mentioned was meetup. On meetup you can join events created by event hosts or individuals. I decided to look around a little on the website by creating an account. Similar to other dating or “befriending” apps, you enter your intentions of usage, picking a minimum of three interests, personal information such as birthday and gender.
Events
There is a wide variety of events, ranging from conference talks by companies to small local book clubs hosted by individuals. Users are able to create and look for events based on a long list of event types, such as dancing, games, support & coaching, science & education, etc. What Liu et. al. discusses in their paper is the cold-start problem. This means how events are in a limited timeframe and one can only show interest from when the event is added to when it is finished (Liu et. al., 2012). In meetup I see that it is possible to create events that happen weekly and one can choose which date you would like to participate in, which in a way helps battle this problem. However, I can see the cold-start problem being a relevant problem if you wish to find people to go to an event with you at the last minute.
Personalisation & Connection
The personalisation of your profile is slightly limited. You have the opportunity to add a bio, display your selected interests, your groups, relationship status, which industry you work in, and add your social media. You are also able to pick which lifestage you are currently in, although they are slightly limited. The website does not focus on showing who you are through images as it only allows for one picture, your profile picture. Although I could see this being slightly positive in the sense that it does not lead to an unrealistic display of peoples lives, I believe images can help users to show their personality better.
What I noticed on meetup is that its primary function is on the creation of events and groups. There is no function to find people and make friends. So instead of looking for people you look for an event that suits you. You are however able to click on event hosts names, and chat. When joining a group you also see a list of group members which you can also chat with, but this is, however, behind a paywall. Which leads us to privacy and security,
Privacy & Security
Putting certain features behind a paywall forces users to give up information, such as your bank or credit card, which will then be linked to your account leading to a possible indirect identification. This makes it slightly more difficult to be anonymous and creates a barrier for people who would like to misuse the application.
Although, as mentioned, the paywall can be an indirect identificator meetup offers no verification process when signing up to use it for free. I believe this makes it harder for users to be able to trust others as creating a fake account is extremely simple. As a privacy setting you are also able to choose who can contact you (users, group members, organizers). Which all in all does protect one much as it is, for example, quite easy to join groups with a new account.
References
Liu, X., He, Q., Tian, Y., Lee, W. C., McPherson, J., & Han, J. (2012, August). Event-based social networks: linking the online and offline social worlds. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 1032-1040).
