I always enjoy the research before the design phase starts. It’s a time when ideals are formed, before the technical and budgetary restrictions of the project have been assigned. Just like college is the idealistic time before your career makes you cynical about the compromises that ensue in the real world, the research is the Ralph Nader while the implementation is the Al Gore.

While performing some community research for a project at work I recently dug into Meetup.com, a site that enjoyed a publicity boost from Howard Dean’s grassroot supporters and the media coverage that followed. There’s also recent blogger linkage due to new Movable Type meetups.

Before Dean’s boon, I’d gone there to look for a Portuguese community in Seattle. There are interested people from Brazil and Portugal and those eager to meet with native speakers, but there’s little to do on the site other than sign up for the next potential meeting. There’s no way to see if they’ve met in the past or to exchange messages with others signed up on the list. How amazingly frustrating — Meetup offers no way to correspond with users, individually or en masse, to establish a rapport before walking blindly into a room of strangers. You can see them there, but can’t contact them. This is particularly problematic when no one person wants to step up to be the host. Instead, some users post links in their profiles to other Yahoo forums and external sites—a very haphazard way of maintaining user interest.

There could also be better user profiles—why not show what other meetups users belong to, if they choose to share; show agendas and reports of last meetings including number of participants, and if the meeting has a serious agenda, what was accomplished. I can see that Meetup is about real-life meetings, but to have restricted contact with other members until the meeting seems to be a leap that many people aren’t willing to take.