On the site, members can view the Community Board, which features listings for various types of activities, like Music, Art, Theater, Movies, Tours, etc. The listings can be filtered by Country, State, and City. There is also a Groups section, which features smaller communities that are open to all and organized around a specific activity or setting more like something Meetup.com would offer - for example, "Ann Arbor Sci-Fi Movies," "Chicago LunchTime Knit Group," or the "Boston Activity Group."

The difference between WhyGoSolo and sites like Meetup.com is that WhyGoSolo does not want to specifically focus on large groups, but more on one-on-one to small group interactions.

A better comparison of WhyGoSolo would be to sites like wannago.com and soon-to-launch zoodango.com. However, unlike those offerings, the WhyGoSolo community isn't meant to be an endpoint for social interactions. Instead, they want to grow into a hub of information that is gathered and then rebroadcast through various means, including social network integration. They already have the WhyGoSolo Facebook application which can be added to your profile to let your Facebook friends know when and what you are interested in doing. There is also a promise of twitter integration, website widgets, a mobile platform, and discounted ticket purchasing in the future.

The site offers different privacy levels: public, friends, or users (members) only. The public status allows everyone who visits WhyGoSolo.com and starts browsing to see your profile, listings and related information. Users Only means that only members of WhyGoSolo can see that info and the friends only setting allows only your friends see it.

Since the site is currently in alpha, it's too early to judge them just yet, but with all of their plans for future offerings, WhyGoSolo is one to keep your eye on.

"Paul and his zealous online supporters offer a case study on how, by leveraging Meetup.com, online activism can be harnessed into offline action," writes Compete's Matt Pace, pointing to the 82,000 Meetup members in Paul's camp who have held nearly 21,000 offline meetings. But how much of that is planned or even officially sanctioned by the Paul campaign?

The second largest Paul group on Meetup, the "Greater NYC Ron Paul Action Group Manhattan+," has a link to the NY4Paul.com site, which is unaffiliated with the Ron Paul campaign. In 2004, when Howard Dean became the poster boy for netroots politics by utilizing the same site (Meetup), it was mainly an accident. The New York Times wrote recently, "Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met." The same thing seems to be happening with Ron Paul now.

Of course, that is the very definition of grassroots. But what it points to is this: these things can't be planned. Ron Paul's grassroots support network grew up by itself, not likely because Paul himself planned it. When Paul raised $4 million on Guy Fawkes Day, it was via a fundraising effort that his campaign had nothing to do with. So, Meetup is less of a secret campaign weapon than is a zealous grassroots support group (the former only works if you already have the latter), but that sort of thing is impossible to plan.

The Compete numbers do tell us a couple of other things, though. According to TechPresident, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still have by far the most Facebook and MySpace supporters, but the FaceTime stats suggest that perhaps Ron Paul is engaging his supporters via the Internet better than his opponents. What the metric doesn't tell us is how many people are watching Paul, just how much they're watching. TechPresident points out that Paul's recent record $6 million single day fundraising haul was made possible by contributions of just 58,000 people (or about .0001933% of the country) -- so it certainly possible that he is engaging his supporters more than his opponents, but that the total number of supporters still numbers far fewer.

That could be why Paul's incredible online support has so far not translated into success in traditional polls of likely voters, where he generally does not make much of an impression (Paul averages just 5% across national Republican polls).

In August, we wondered why there was such a disconnect between online popularity and poll numbers in a post called The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics?. We suggested three reasons, including demographics, "cool factor," and that the traditional polling methods themselves were screwed up. But I think perhaps the best possible cause of the disconnect came from one of our commenters.

"There's a possible fourth reason for the disconnect - the internet is international. US politics has worldwide implications and so non-US citizens and even non-US residents care about the US election, watch candidate videos on YouTube and befriend them on social networks. However, they don't vote," wrote Elad.

Outside of the US, where anti-war sentiment is often much stronger, it seems likely that onlookers would be attracted to the more staunchly anti-war candidates (like Paul on the Republican side, and Obama or Kucinich on the Democratic side). Further, Paul and Obama are also likely seen as the most anti-establishment candidates (due to Paul's Libertarian views, which contrast sharply with those of his fellow Republicans, and the perception that Obama is a Washington outsider because of the short time he has been in the Senate). I wonder how many of Paul's 5.8 million YouTube views come from outside the US?