This week­end we pulled together a quick din­ner with Craig New­mark, the “Craig” of “Craigslist” for over 30 peo­ple in New York City’s Kore­atown, arranged in just around 30 hours. (In my house­hold we refer to “Craig,” “Other Craig,” and “Craigslist Craig.” Who knew that Craig was such a pop­u­lar name among techies.)

The invi­ta­tion was sent over Twit­ter (which links to my Face­book account), so as to be demo­c­ra­tic. I have just under 10,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and 2,500 “friends” on Face­book — these are not mutu­ally exclu­sive groups.

When I told my Craig (not Craigslist Craig) about this, he was utterly baf­fled — as issu­ing an open invi­ta­tion to the world via Twit­ter is com­pletely the oppo­site of any impulse he would have. I think this reflects per­son­al­ity reac­tions to the open­ness and ran­dom­ness of social media.

A fun crowd mate­ri­al­ized and they enjoyed meet­ing each other (because the type of peo­ple who show up to this kind of event are the kind of peo­ple who enjoy meet­ing other peo­ple). We had a writer from The Daily Show, one of the founders of Four Square, two TED staffers, a for­mer City Coun­cil can­di­date, a New York Times busi­ness reporter, and Googlers, etc. (Here is one account).

I mar­vel at the abil­ity of social media to quickly mobi­lize and orga­nize peo­ple, which of course is socially sig­nif­i­cant not just because we can eat crispy poul­try on a Sat­ur­day night, but for polit­i­cal movements.

It started with a Tweet from Craig that men­tioned that his niece had been impressed that he had been to Pinkberry, the trendy Korean-American frozen yogurt phe­nom­e­non. (I had taken him to Pinkberry last time we had met.)

I tweeted back, in that friendly social way where you don’t nec­es­sar­ily expect peo­ple to take you up on it, that we should get Korean fried chicken the next time he was in New York City, which actu­ally hap­pened to be that weekend.

He men­tioned that sounded good. We agreed for a time for din­ner, and I asked if he wanted me to invite other peo­ple. Craig, ever affa­ble and will­ing to meet new peo­ple, said sure. (He’s a pleas­ant guy whose philoso­phies about his epony­mous site have con­founded the com­mer­i­cal inter­ests on the Inter­net).

I was sure many folks would want to meet Craig, given how much he has impacted our lives. So instead of email­ing friends, I tweeted out an open invi­ta­tion (why not?), uncer­tain how many peo­ple we would get, and how many we could even fit in the modest-sized Korean fried chicken joints.

Yuna Park, whose fam­ily owns Baden Baden chicken (which has a loca­tion in Kore­atown) and who works in social media her­self, tweeted back and asked if we were going there. I was not orig­i­nally on plan­ning so, but I offered to move it there if we could be guar­an­teed seat­ing for every­one, and also if they were will­ing to do a prix fixe, which reduces messi­ness of split­ting up the bill. We set it at $20, not includ­ing alco­hol. That num­ber was arbi­trar­ily cho­sen because it was easy to deal with logis­ti­cally. (Of course later, my other Korean-American friend pointed out that Baden style was rotis­serie and not the crispy wings and drum­sticks that had been made famous at Bön Chon and Mad about Chicken. Oh well. I fig­ured most peo­ple wouldn’t have a point of comparison.)

And so the RSVP emails came in. Craig also emailed peo­ple he knew.

Inevitably, we had some peo­ple who flaked. Here are some of the peo­ple who checked in via Four Square.

It ended up being a good deal for every­one involved, in large part because we set the din­ner early, at 6 p.m., which is a more or less empty time for them. Baden designed a lengthy menu, that involved not only the fried chicken, but curry pork cut­let, kim chee noo­dles, udon noo­dles, pigs feet, spicy squid, and fruit. Baden got expo­sure to new cus­tomers, who oth­er­wise might now know how to find the restau­rant, which is up a ele­va­tor with no signs out­side in Eng­lish. (The secret of Kore­atown is every­thing cool is either upstairs or downstairs).

It seems like a nice way to get a rov­ing crowd of eaters and expose them to new restau­rants and foods in a low-risk, highly social way.

Next up, dim sum?

One of the sis­ters of a dinner-goers was so excited that her brother was meet­ing Craig, she texted a mes­sage to pass along: “tell him thank you for my first job, my apart­ment, my couch, my table, my foot­ball league, my friend jesse meet­ing her hus­band, my bike etc.”

Ran­dom fact I learned from din­ner. Craig had orig­i­nally thought of call­ing his web­site SFevents or some­thing like that, since his orig­i­nal list was a com­pendium of events in the Bay Area. His co-workers said no, they had already started call­ing it “Craigslist” and so he was overruled.

Tags: Craig Newmark, Craiglist, Food, Koreatown, Twitter