How Do You Choose a Meetup Group?

There are a lot of Meetup groups in New York City. 2,028 "within 5 miles of New York" to be exact (there are a total of 36,967 worldwide). I'm a member of:

• Mashable Meetups
• New York Online Advertising and Marketing Group
• New York Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup
• NY P2P 2.0 Meetup Group
• NY Tech Meetup
• NY Video 2.0
• The Advertising Club of NY Meetup
• The Bay Ridge Friends Meetup Group

I was looking through the list of other Meetups that I might be interested in and it was, frankly, overwhelming. You can narrow the list down by geography (which makes sense because these are in-person Meetups) and then by topic. I navigated to: USA>New York>New York>Work & Career and was presented with a massive list of titles.

I was a little lost and, in the end, didn't end up joining any other Meetups. It got me thinking... It would be very cool if you could tell Meetup where your LinkedIn or Facebook profile lives and have it automatically scan for topics that you're interested in. Then, it would return a list of contextually relevant Meetup groups. It could even take a look at your friend's profiles to find out what types of people you tend to associate yourself with.

I'd also like to see further integration with photo/video sharing sites. Why should I go to CenterNetworks (not to knock Allen) to see a recap of the last NY Tech Meetup? I'd like to see it on the actual Meetup page.

I won't even begin on the improvements that could be made to the e-mail discussions.

I've got lots of ideas for you, Meetup. *wink**wink*