Meetup is a global social network specifically designed for groups. You can connect with people who share your interests and live near you. Choose from a wide variety of group categories that include Automotive, Books, Film/TV, Education, Games, Hobbies, Pets and Politics & Activism. Each group also has dozens of sub–categories. For example, the Hobbies group includes Scrapbooking, Travel, Dance, Paranormal, Art and Photography—just to name a few.

Once you’ve chosen a group, you can narrow your search by sub–categories or keyword.

The only downside to Meetup are the membership fees. You can create an account, attend events and join a Meetup Group free of charge; however, Group organizers are required to pay a fee on behalf of the Group, so fees collected by group organizers will vary depending on the amount of Group members.

There is an advantage to Meetup’s membership fees—the website is not cluttered with annoying ads and pop–ups.

Meetup currently has three price plans:

$12 a month for 6 months (a single $72 charge)

$15 a month for 3 months (a single $45 charge)

$19 a month

Each plan has a 30–day money back guarantee

We conducted a test search for offensive content such as sexually charged language or sexually explicit photos. We only found one questionable photo, but nothing worse than you can see on primetime TV. The minimum age to join Meetup is 18, so closely monitoring their content is not as important as websites who allow minors to join.

They have a small FAQs section and you can contact them through an email form.

For the best social networking website we could find with dozens of networking features and groups, see MySpace.