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Also @ is a symbol that is immediately associated with a response. If people say @vincent, I immediately know if they're talking to me, vs. @Jesse, where I know they're not.
username itself. The clients are only looking to see if there is an @, and
*then* they look at the username. In reality they should be looking only at
the username and categorizing it as a reply. The @ should have no
significance in the technology itself. And again, once threaded comments
are enabled the username isn't even necessary.
1. it addresses people: you can address other people than just the writer of the dent you're replying to
2. you can address one or more people without necessarily replying to anything/anyone at all, just starting a conversation
3. it is necessary for disambiguation: any word could be a nickname but you're not necessarily addressing that person (or even aware that it might be an existing nickname) when using that word
still address someone by simply posting their username and no @ symbol. For
#3 you'll have a few ambiguities, but the majority of mentions of a nickname
by your circle of friends will be actual nicknames - it will also make
people think twice before choosing a nickname that is a common English
word. This has been around in IRC clients for ages and no one has
complained. And again, that can all be solved by technology - there really
is no reason for the '@' symbol if the microblogging client just handles it
right. The @ clutters up Twitter and takes one character out that you could
be using in the 140 char allotment you already have.
Jesse
IRC is a poor comparison, because you can address someone only by starting a message with their nick. At least I know of no IRC client that somehow automatically shows who a message is addressed to other than by the fact a msg starts with a nickname, followed by a comma or colon. Everything else is ambiguous.
In Twitter, I found the necessity to start a reply with a @nick a poor and needlessly limited implementation of the idea - even a tweet starting with 2 @nicks is still a reply only to the first.
(You're also incorrect addressing with @ was somehow "mostly a Twitter-invented custom": it's long been a wide-spread custom in forum and blog-comment discussions, a custom Twitter users simply - and quite logically - continued to use in a new context.)
The advantage of identi.ca's implementation is that you can address (without any ambiguity) anyone and "anymany" by @-addressing them anywhere in your post. Sentences can be more natural that way.
And, of course, the more people sign up, the greater the chance of ambiguity. Whether some word is a "common English word" is no argument here, of course - not all conversation is in English, and people may sign up who do not even know English: how could they "think twice" about that? - how would you know the difference between a nick and a word in /any/ language?
I really don't care that it takes all of 5 characters when one is addressing 5 people - and I'm an advocate of limiting to 140chars at the same time. There's no "clutter" in using @ - just clear intent that isn't present without it: without the @ in front of the nick of all you're addressing one simply can no longer see who you are addressing (if anyone at all).
You won't see me dropping any of my @s!
username. In fact it will highlight a message and notify me if my username
is mentioned anywhere in someone's comment.
'@' was made popular by Twitter - I did admit it was around before Twitter
though.
The common-English words are the only reason I can see a need for "@"'s. I
still think there can be ways around that with well-written technology
though.
@ or not. It should be the users that determine that. The technology
should be looking at the username and let the users decide how they want to
address someone.
The @ helps to create a client as simple as it can be, the threaded discussions makes it harder to write a simple client that doesn't require much for the user to decide which thread they are replying. Think of the IM clients who doesn't have twitter/identi.ca specific guis and the whole gui is implemented on the bot who talks with you, so this mean that for threads the bot will require a lot more of instruction from your side. Our bots aren't that smart yet.
1 - Lots of nicknames are also nouns. How can you differentiate between the two without some indicator that the word is a nickname? (i.e. boat marina and @marina)
2 - How do you thread conversations over IM? Or SMS?
3 - Again, when replying to multiple people at once, threading doesn't apply, and I don't understand how it would be sure if I was intending "John" or "@john."
4 - I'm a beginning programmer, so I have no idea if this is valid, but it seems like parsing entire messages for potential usernames across federated systems would be complicated.
thoughts I've gathered around your points. Simply put, I think the root of
the matter is all centered around the "what are you doing" theme. Anything
outside of that realm should be meta information of some sort outside of the
message itself - i.e. replies should be linked via meta in_reply_to_status
API calls. Users intended to see a particular message should be tagged, but
tagging should be done via the API and the client should provide access into
that API. Regarding IM or SMS, IMO those should be information gathering
tools, not information posting tools, as they are too hard to guide users
into using the system in the correct manner. I'll ellaborate in my post
this weekend with some concrete examples - the conversation is too
fragmented at the moment and I think part of that is the fault of the
microblogging platforms not providing the proper tie-ins to de-fragment the
system.
Jesse