I agree, and since meetup.com is a lot more locally relevant it has more "opportunities" to connect with their users in a way that would not be regarded as spammy.
Though it is harder to scale, I think there is a lot of potential in this go local strategy.
The thing I don't like is that the feature they've been seem to be copied from Facebook rather than being specific to Meetup - especially, it would be nice to have to calendar and event oriented and less chat-oriented (especially, it's annoying getting extra-info about event I already decided not to go to).
But the valued offered by Meetup is in many ways better than the Facebook equation; Meet people you don't already know face-to-face rather than chatting online with people you've known forever anyway.