[This is a excerpt from Ange's blog, originally posted May 2010]

A few weeks ago I’d seen a hash tag being floated about on Twitter: #themeetup140 People were tweeting and retweeting it. Then came a tweet from Mark ( @markofrespect ) asking if we were going along. From what I’d read about these meetups (from the London one that is) it would be an informal get-together of a group of people with a common interest in social media. My first thought was ‘yes I’d love to go but not being a social media professional in any way, I’d stick out like a sore thumb’… how wrong can you be.

Read the full post on Ange’s blog.

[This is an excerpt from Rhona's blog originally posted in December 2010]

Standing upstairs in Musa on Thursday night, I surveyed the roomful of people who 5 months ago I wouldn’t have known from Adam. Not only that, but because we’re such an incredible cross-section of the population, our paths would have probably never crossed down the line either. IT consultants, teachers, sound engineers, cyclists, secretaries, web designers, game developers, students, shop workers, artists, accountants, photographers. Teenagers, 20somethings, 30somethings, 40somethings and then some. All people whose lives had not yet brought them together until they entered the room, attached a badge with their twitter username on their jumpers and started talking to one another.

At the start of this year I made a New Years’ Resolution that I was determined to keep – I wanted to meet some new people and make some new friends. I’ve been back in Aberdeen for three years now and from starting right from scratch I’ve made many dear friends who mean the world to me, but this year I had an urge to get a bit more out of my city and expand my horizons a little. Since then I’ve made a bit more of an effort to connect with some people my age at work, I met a friend from Livejournal for the first time in real life – through her I have met a whole swathe of fabulous ladies, and of course – I started going to #themeet140.

When I think about it, there’s not really anything that links us all together – a shared interest as it were. We just all seem to like meeting people for the sake of it – we truly are the monthly meeting of people who meet! Perhaps as tweeters who talk about our lives in an open forum, assuming that someone somewhere is listening, we all have a little something in common in that regard. But without exception I have found the crowd who frequent ‘the meet’ (as it’s now called in our household) are a colourful rainbow of outgoing, creative, welcoming and ambitious people who I count myself lucky to know.

Read the full post on Rhona’s Blog

[This is a post from Geraldine's blog, originally posted August 2010]

Stranger: One who is neither a friend nor an acquaintance?

That is how the dictionary defines a stranger. I added the question mark because I am not sure I agree. To me a stranger to me is just someone I haven’t got to know yet, someone I haven’t talked to or connected with.  All sensible personal safety issues aside, there is something about meeting or connecting with someone for the first time that is a special experience.

So I found myself thinking about strangers, the guy who I say good morning to at the bus stop, have a brief chat about the weather or the state of the bus service, is he a stranger? I probably know more about his bus habits than his Mrs., which songs he listens to on his iPod, which seat he likes to sit in and why he gets off one stop earlier than he should. Does that make him a stranger? The woman who is usually in front of me in the queue at Starbucks, I know her coffee habits, on a Wednesday she goes to yoga so only has decaf, on a Friday she always has fruit toast because she goes straight to a morning meeting; is she a stranger because we only chat in the Starbucks queue? Not to me, these people are a part of my life in a small way, they will never be my close friends but they form part of my morning and I wonder where they are when I don’t see them. I often wonder what they think of me, am I just the chatty bird that they dread seeing every morning or like me, do they enjoy our brief passing observations on life? Strangers in the queues exchanging glances, strangers in the queue exchanging triple shots !

On Thursday I took a leap of faith into a room full of strangers’, if we are going by the correct definition. I went along to my first #themeet140 at the Lansdowne Bar in the West End of Glasgow. A bar I have been into many times but never to meet people who were ‘neither friend nor acquaintance’. I had a crap 9 hour day at work, crammed in three hours of study and had a very annoying call just before I got there, so you can imagine my mood.  However within five minutes of meeting @SkelptArse and @allanbarr the mood lifted.  My fear about not being in Social Media but merely being a Twitteraholic quickly lifted and when the conversation turned to how to eat custard creams and where to buy the best cowboy boots and hats in the USA, heaven ! Where else in the world would you have a lawyer, an investment bank analyst, researchers and a skelped arse chatting about dipping your toe in JR’s pool? I could go on forever about the various conversations but to say that these ‘neither friends nor acquaintances’ made me feel welcome would be an understatement. No longer ‘strangers’! My biggest regret was that I could only stay for a short while and the fact that it took me half an hour to get out the door says it all.

Thank you so much to @markofrespect for being exactly as I thought you would be and @allanbarr for the PMA lecture and for the compliment, I had a wonderful time and the next time I will have loads of questions for you expert Twitters on how to use it betterer as my godson says!

Apologies to @tartancat @Ange77H @pavedwithgold1 and anyone else I missed will hopefully get the chance for a chat the next time.

So I am definitely going with Will Rogers quote …“A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.”

Until the next #themeet140