Meetup is the community-building Internet service made famous by followers of Governor Howard Dean and other presidential candidates. During this campaign season, thousands of citizens have logged on to Meetup.com to find like-minded people in their towns and arranged face-to-face meetings to discuss and promote their favored politicians.

But Meetups are not only for the politically minded. You can find groups that get together over a cup of coffee or a beer to talk about quilting, Oprah Winfrey, paganism, Wi-Fi technology, and thousands of other topics.

Scott Heiferman is CEO of Meetup.com.

The political use gets all the attention and Howard Dean was the poster boy of that. But in fact a full two-thirds of the people who have signed up for Meetups in the past year – a million people – have signed up for Meetups that have nothing to do with politics. The Pug owners or Chihuahua owners that want to meet up with other people who have the same dog breed. Or the people that want to Meetup around a health condition. Out on main street, it’s being used in much more than political ways, even though it’s the politics that gets all the attention.

Do you think you tapped into a real need for community that was unfulfilled?

I think so. It’s a culture where talking to strangers is a dangerous thing, not necessarily something that is good. People used to be a part of a local community group or they’d go to some meeting. But now we work more, we commute more, watch more TV, sit in front of the Internet. All these things which disconnect us from community. We live in a world of Wal-Marts and Gaps and Starbucks and the question is how do you use this infrastructure we have now, the infrastructure of the Internet, the infrastructure of Starbucks on every corner? How do we used it to re-engage community, to revitalize community? Meetup is just this little tool which will organize when and where people are going to Meetup. People wanted something like that.

Is the concept of Meetup mature? Or are you taking this somewhere else in the future?

Good question. How we’re going to evolve it just listening to what people want from Meetup. They want to be part of something bigger than just their local group. Those Chihuahua owners in Minneapolis, they know they’re not just Chihuahua owners of Minneapolis, but they are the Chihuahua owners of the U.S. and the world. Seeing how these groups of Meetups interconnect and really questioning what it means to be an association. And so where we’re going is just listening to how our users want more control, more power, more influence, and how their Meetups work.