I have to credit Mad Femme Pride with being my inspiration for this group. When so many social groups were organizing online with Yahoo groups, MFP made their internet home on meetup.com and it appears to work really well for them. Meetup.com is a great service that focuses on helping people organize face-to-face meetings. I would have used it right away, but I'm poor these days and so looked around for free alternatives. (Meetup.com is free to atendees. It only charges the organizers, and really, even for that the cost is very modest, but still, I'm looking to start out on the cheap here.) I discovered that upcoming.com, recently bought by Yahoo, looks pretty good as a free alternative, even if not quite as pretty, polished, and feature-rich as meetup.com. Let's try it.

Strengths I see of upcoming.com are:

• Focus on attending real life events.


• Great flexibility for scheduling events and managing invitations.


• Popular enough that *lots* of local events are listed. It's like the community calendar section of a newspaper. Too lazy to organize a new event? Never mind, there are countless things going on all over the city every day. Just pick one, grab some friends, and go!

Things that are probably better found elsewhere:

• Online discussion forums


• Links to resources on the web


• Lists of transgender organizations


• Pictures, video, and so on