A year or so ago when I wrote about meetup.com starting to charge for their services, I complained that the DNC needed to come out with their own out of the box solution. Since then DFA launched theirs, Townhall did so too and some private sector replacements have sprung up.

Yesterday, though, the DNC launched their own package, including a meetup type application, Party Builder:

Over a year ago, a few of us here in the DNC’s Internet department started talking about devolving our technology to users. After all, you’re Democrats too, so why were we the only ones with a blog on Democrats.org? Well, after a lot of work by a lot of people, now you do — along with a lot of other things.

We’re pushing out a group of tools today we call PartyBuilder. A literal name for obvious reasons: the Party belongs to you, and it’s built upon the work and passion so many of you have put into things like door knocking, phone banking and, yes, contributing. Now, we’re giving you the tools to build it online.

There’s a lot here. Social networking, grouping, a community blog, the events tool you’ve used for things like the 50-State Canvass or the Democratic Reunion, personal fundraising tools, and a petitions and letters section that we’re going to expand on. You should take a minute to look through it…it’s exciting stuff.

I’d like to tell you more, but I can’t seem to log in. I know I have an account with democrats.org, it won’t let me create a new account with my email address, but it also won’t let me sign in with it. Even when I request a new password. Weirdness.

Anyway.

This is a good description of the different tools. I’m mostly interested in the local meeting tool, friends tool (which could replicate the “getting the newbies involved” greatness of meetup) and the My Friends tool (kind of like MySpace for Democrats?).

One thing I hope happens is that the CIOs of the various state parties and the tech geeks at the county and local parties latch onto this and try to meld as much of what we’re doing to what is going on at the national level. Actually, that would be something tell you could happen if I could sign in. A great idea would be to have an RSS feed based on a search of local events from democrats.org. That feed could be published on the sites of local Democrat clubs. Would be pretty cool.