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The @ has taken over

After all is said and done, maybe the greatest innovation to come out of twitter is going to be the @username convention.

Today, as I was testing out DropBox with a little text file titled thank-you.txt, thanking Tony Hung for figuring out a backdoor way of inviting people, I noticed that some of the newcomers took the file and started adding their own messages to it.

That’s how powerful this convention has become. There was no real practical reason for using it, but the @ coupled with a twitter username has become a very powerful signifier.

On FriendFeed, people are following the same convention.

I think it speaks to the power of Twitter that our online identities have become so closely linked to it.

@fredericl I disagree!

@gaberivera

I wholeheartedly agree! Thought ‘@’ was used sparingly before Twitter came about, Twitter has definitely made it apart of our everyday commenting habits and put it at the forefront of commenting.

[...] The @ has taken over :: The Last Podcast – Frederic mulls over the idea that the ubiquitous @ sign before a person’s name; or nickname, may be coming our newest social identifier [...]

[...] The @ has taken over :: The Last Podcast – Frederic mulls over the idea that the ubiquitous @ sign before a person’s name; or nickname, may be coming our newest social identifier [...]