I’ve had a couple of people ask me lately what the origins of the name “ATUB” are. Once people actually understood that ATUB = Adelaide Twitter Meetups, they were all trying to figure out what the U and B stood for. Well, it stands for Adelaide Twitter Underground Brigade. Although we’re not so underground anymore, the name has stuck (because the rest of Australia still use it)!

Back in 2007 when I first joined Twitter, it was a dark empty room. When you first join, it is quiet. I didn’t know anyone else using the service so I left for a few months and came back to meet a couple of other Adelaide people and new interstate friends. Thanks to a lot of them, I realised how valuable the service was.

Sydney and Melbourne already had very well established Twitter meetups, and formed their names based around the fact that Twitter was still a mostly unknown world. Facebook was still developing and poaching MySpace users at this time, so Twitter was left to grow on its own.

I attended my first Twitter “meetup” in early 2008, when I met up with a friend (who no longer lives in Adelaide). At this stage, not very many people were keen to meetup or were busy. Eventually we met others, and in late 2008 after a brief break from Twitter myself, the media had done the hyping Twitter needed to become more of a social meetup network.

I put faces to names for the first time in December 2008 when I held a BarCamp Adelaide Planning Meeting and the Twitter meets followed regularly from here. They used to be every Friday night, but in recent months after a few breaks and demand for different days increased, we’ve polled our attendees instead. That’s how we came to the Sunday afternoon conclusion, as well as the venue – The Highway.

We also have another Twitter account which mirrors the ATUB tweets called @AdelaideTweetup where we hope the name itself will be enough to attract more attendees (as it’s very self explanatory).

Hopefully we’ll see you on Sunday afternoon!

@monnie