I started using MeetIn.org two months ago, having found myself a social butterfly with its wings clipped. My best friend had bought her first home and was busy caulking the bathtub and painting walls. Another buddy was getting ready for her first baby. Yet another was working two jobs. After spending one more Sunday weeding my yard, it dawned on me that I needed to find more friends to join me for hikes and concerts.

But making new friends is not easy, even in Portland, Ore., a superfriendly city. I am too shy to initiate conversations with strangers at my favorite bookstore, the gym, or lectures. At first, the Web didn’t look too promising, since the only new people who ever seem to contact me through my page on MySpace (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) are spammers selling Viagra. Then a friend told me about http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?capId=429894, an online social network designed to help people find new friends—not the romantic kind—to do fun stuff with in the real world. Millions Reach Beyond Cyberspace

Apparently I’m not alone in my quest for offline friendships. Social networking sites that attempt to go beyond the conventional, online-only services offered by the likes of MySpace and Evite http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?capId=28298 have been enjoying stellar growth. MeetIn’s user base has nearly doubled, vs. a year ago, to 75,000 people in 90 cities worldwide. Other sites focused on getting people together offline report strong growth as well. Launched five months ago, nightclub-oriented MingleNow.com already boasts 1 million users.

With MeetIn you set up a profile, which can include your photo, age, and brief sections on education and interests (MeetIn’s largest and most active chapter is in Portland, where more than 6,600 people have created profiles). Each member can post invites to events—dinners, concerts, salsa dancing, Frisbee outings—for others to join. The Portland contingent posts about 150 events a month. Promotional and singles events are a no-no. “I was very, very nervous and apprehensive,” remembers Joanne Couchman, who came to her first MeetIn event in 2005, after she and her boyfriend relocated to Portland from the East Coast. “But I walked in and these people made me feel like I’ve known them forever.”

The similarly named http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?capId=429894, which helps people find events ranging from scrapbooking to lectures on social justice, has seen the number of RSVPs on its site double in the past five months. To keep up with the growth, MeetUp plans to double its staff this year to 60 people, says Scott Heiferman, co-founder of the site. “We are growing faster than ever.” Finding the Right Niche

That this physical-world extension of social networking is catching on makes sense given the way members of the most popular sites are already using the services. In a survey of 3,357 people between 12 and 21 years old, 22% of those who identified themselves as MySpace users said they use the site to look for event information, according to Forrester Research (http://www.businessweek.com/ticker/) (BusinessWeek.com, 12/12/05, ). So do 30% of http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?capId=20765463 users, even though neither site had well-developed event-planning capabilities. It’s not always easy to post and disseminate event photos or send out invites. And the events that are listed aren’t always appealing: When I searched MySpace’s Portland events, a marijuana party and several adult events topped the list, though there were some dance outings and parties that were more to my liking.

(07-24) 12:45 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) —

Gas prices extended their slide at the pump overnight, and oil and gasoline futures posted big declines Tuesday on a growing view that demand for gasoline is ebbing and inventories are growing.

A perception that oil prices have been driven higher by speculation and not by supply-and-demand concerns also led some investors to lock in profits, analysts said.

The average retail national price of a gallon of gas fell 1.2 cents overnight to $2.956, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Retail prices peaked at $3.227 a gallon in late May.

Retail prices typically lag the futures market, and gasoline futures have fallen more than 31 cents a gallon over the last two weeks. In Tuesday trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, gas futures for August delivery dropped an additional 5.64 cents to settle at $2.0477 a gallon.

The tumble in gasoline futures helped drag light, sweet crude for September delivery down $1.33 to settle at $73.56 a barrel on the Nymex.

September Brent crude dropped $1.78 to settle at $75.08 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

Nymex heating oil futures lost 2.52 cents to settle at $2.0309 a gallon. Natural gas futures dropped 17.6 cents to settle at $5.863 per 1,000 cubic feet. Natural gas prices have been pressured in recent days by forecasts for cooler weather and expectations that inventories will grow to record levels next month.

Oil refineries have boosted production in recent weeks, leading investors to a view that gasoline supplies would indeed be enough to meet demand. Gas and oil prices rallied this spring and early summer on concerns that an unusual number of refinery outages would prevent the industry from producing enough gas this summer.

Refinery utilization increased in last week’s inventory report from the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration, and investors are betting it will grow again in Wednesday’s report.

Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires on average predict gasoline inventories grew by 510,000 barrels last week as refinery utilization grew 0.8 percentage points to 91.8 percent.

The growing refinery runs likely drew crude oil inventories down by 1.1 million barrels. Distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, are forecast to have grown by 730,000 barrels.

While investors believe gasoline inventories are growing now, they also realize that refiners are already looking ahead to the fall, when demand for gasoline drops and refiners can make and sell less expensive “winter grade” gasoline, said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research Inc., in Winchester, Mass.

Refiners plan out a month in advance when trying to decide how much oil to buy and which products to process it into, Lynch explained.

“The driving season is almost over, as far as refineries are concerned,” Lynch said.

Oil investors are also selling to lock in profits, Lynch said. Many analysts believe record levels of speculation in oil futures have driven prices to artificial highs, he said.

“I think they realize that they’ve distorted the market, and people are pulling out,” Lynch said.

Oil prices have also been pressured this week by comments from several OPEC officials that seemed to indicate the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries might be open to boosting output after months of steadfastly arguing that no production increases were necessary.

“That represents a change from ‘no way,’ to ‘maybe,’” wrote Peter Beutel, president of U.S. energy risk management firm Cameron Hanover, in a research note. “It was the first time this year that OPEC has shown any willingness towards flexibility.”

___

Associated Press Writers Pablo Gorondi in Budapest and Gillian Wong in Singapore contributed to this report.

In 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of digital trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient war horse of computing.

Today, mainframe sales are tiny compared with the personal computer market. But as the mainframe faced extinction, IBM retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. One result is that mainframe technology - hardware, software and services - remains a large and lucrative business for the company, and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the worlds financial markets and much of global commerce.

The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent. But the old technology often finds a sustainable, profitable life.

Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railroads. A current death forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: There must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.

The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism,” said Richard Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.

To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature. Indeed, John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems.

Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived, and today there are more than 8,000 species of reptiles, mainly lizards and snakes, compared with about 5,400 species of mammals.

As a media technology, radio is a survivor. Its time as the hub of U.S. households in the 1930s and 1940s gave way to television. But radio adopted shorter programming formats and became background music and chat that is listened to while people ride in cars or do other things at home - “audio wallpaper,” as Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, puts it.

While television did pose a threat to movies, it also served as a prod to innovation, including failures like Smell-O-Vision but also widescreen, rich-color technologies like Cinerama and CinemaScope. The idea - and a good one - was to give viewers a more vivid, immersive experience than they could possibly have with television.

Today movies, like other traditional media, face the digital challenge of the Internet. And Saffo is betting that after a period of adjustment and experimentation, they will make another life-prolonging adaptation.

The survivors build on their technical foundations as well as the human legacy of people skilled in the use of a technology, and the business culture and habits that surround it.

The mainframe is the classic survivor technology, and it owes its longevity to sound business decisions. IBM overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine. The company invested and updated the mainframe software, so that banks, corporations and government agencies could still rely on the mainframe as the reliable and secure computer for vital transactions and data, while allowing it to take on new chores like running Web-based programs.

IBMs most recent model, the z10, represents an investment of $1.5 billion and the work of 5,000 technical professionals. To nurture its ecosystem, the company partners with 400 universities worldwide in programs to teach mainframe skills.

“The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didnt care about the underlying technology,” said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of the mainframe in the early 1990s and is now a visiting professor at MIT. “Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and IBM made the investments to make that happen.”