ReadWriteWeb

Photo: Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP Content Development and Lead Writer, and Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Last week we had our first official ReadWriteWeb meetup at the Green Dragon in Portland, OR. Why Portland? Well, for starters, it's got the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb staff, but also because Portland is a great city, with one of the most active tech scenes out there. The meetup was great, with just the right mix of people, conversations and beer.

But not everyone can get to Portland to talk tech, so we wanted to make sure we gave you all a venue to do just that in your own area.

ReadWriteWeb is thrilled to announce the first in a series of local RWW meetups. These meetups, made up of ReadWriteWeb readers like yourselves, should be an excellent way to have some great, thought-provoking discussions and meet other tech enthusiasts in your area.

Our inaugural meetup will be held in the city with the highest concentration of ReadWriteWeb writers, Portland, Oregon, on October 13 at the Green Dragon. Richard MacManus, our esteemed Founder and Editor in Chief, will even be there, all the way from New Zealand, so if you're in the area, please do stop in and say hello. Click here to RSVP, we'd love to see you there!

Last week, we wrote about the virtual user rebellion over at social organization site Meetup. The site had unleashed a drastic redesign that many users said they never saw coming and these selfsame users came out in droves to complain in the site's feedback forum. In less than 24 hours, nearly 4,000 users came out to vote that the site "give organizers the ability to restore the old format."

While the company hasn't completely rolled back the redesign, it has come out with a blog post explaining the changes, apologizing and vowing to fix them.

Whenever a company makes a big change to its layout, there are likely to be some complaints. You can't make everybody happy all the time, right?

Well, social organization site Meetup plopped down a redesign that it's calling "New Meetup" and its users have come out in droves to ask for the "Old Meetup" back.

WhyGoSolo, a completely self-funded startup from Washington D.C., wants to help you transition your online relationships and friendships to the offline world. For some people, the interactions they have online are so fulfilling that they are overlooking the importance of having real-world relationships. With WhyGoSolo's online community and tools like their Facebook app and upcoming twitter integration, you'll now have a new way to meet people online to hang out with in the real world.

Web metrics firm Compete released their latest "Candidate FaceTime" metric yesterday, which measures how many hours people are spending across the social networking profiles of US presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul continues to dominate all candidates, while Barack Obama leads the pack among Democrats. The biggest surprise is the rise of Mike Huckabee -- who has also been rising in national polls -- perhaps due to the Chuck Norris bump (what can't that guy do?). Compete, however, points to Meetup as the true secret weapon.