A couple of Million for A2K, no for a thing called MeetUp

Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, has not felt much need to stay involved in business. He remains chairman of eBay, but last year he resigned from other company boards to devote more time to building his foundation.

He expects eventually to give away much of his eBay wealth (now about $6.5 billion) to causes that he hopes will help people become more active in their communities.

Then over the summer, he found out about Meetup.com, an Internet company based in New York that wants to make a business out of connecting people to discuss topics from politics to potty training. Intrigued, Mr. Omidyar, 36, invested several million dollars in the company (he would not say exactly how much) last month and joined its board.

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"I've always believed that helping people connect around a shared passion is good for business and good for the community," Mr. Omidyar said in a telephone interview last week from his home in Las Vegas. "The early eBay users saw the trade as just an excuse to get to know other people who shared their passions about collecting."

Like eBay, Meetup is turning out to be a bigger idea than it may have appeared at first. The concept is to use the Internet to set up face-to-face meetings among people of like interests, rather than the pseudonymous message boards that are considered communities on the Internet.

Meetup was founded in 2002 by Scott Heiferman, 31, who had started two Internet companies during the boom era - one called iTraffic, an interactive advertising agency, which he sold to Agency.com in 1999 for $15 million, and another called Rocketboard, a keyboard business that ultimately failed.

The Meetup site promotes monthly events where people can gather to discuss various topics.

For example, the fourth Tuesday of each month is witches meet-up day, for which 23,748 people have signed up. Some 5,500 people have joined the knitting meet-up group, which meets on the third Wednesday of each month.

Mr. Heiferman's initial plan was to have restaurants and bars pay Meetup to have their locations publicized as meeting spots. Users do not pay anything to attend the events, but they do tend to buy food and drinks. Indeed, more than 250 establishments in 50 cities pay $69 to $500 a month to be on the system.

What Mr. Heiferman did not expect was how the Web site would become instrumental in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. In January, Joe Trippi, Dr. Dean's campaign manager, heard that a small group of Dean supporters was arranging get-togethers using the site. Soon he persuaded Meetup to let the campaign formally use the site to organize supporters and to get their e-mail addresses - with permission.