Twitter Replies Become Mentions

Twitter has just announced a small but significant change in their system: “replies” have become “mentions”.

A “reply” in Twitter is considered to be a tweet that starts with @username. However the @ syntax is often used elsewhere in a tweet, for example “via @username”. Previously these examples weren’t picked up in the replies section. The new mentions feature shows references to @username anywhere in the Tweet.

This change will also apply to the API so app developers may want/need to make some changes.

What’s really interesting about this is that it’s a response by Twitter to what the user community is already doing – the company is listening to the wisdom of the crowd and applying it. As it says on the Twitter blog:

The @Replies feature was introduced because we noticed lots of folks putting the @ symbol in front of Twitter usernames as a way of addressing one another. For example: @biz what are you drinking in your avatar? (It’s a soy latte.) So, we started linking the @username references and collecting any tweets that began with @username on one page to make them easier to track.

Now that the users have become more sophisticated, Twitter has responded again by migrating to the Mentions system:

However, folks started getting more inventive as they often do. Now people include @username mentions in the middle of tweets as a way to simply reference another account. For example: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston. Also, folks reference multiple accounts in a single tweet like this: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston with @ev @crystal and @goldman.

An interesting point is that the old web page for viewing your replies used to be twitter.com/replies. The new web page for viewing your mentions is… still twitter.com/replies. The @mentions username points to a Greasemonkey script from Hao Chen that provided mentions functionality as an add on before Twitter adopted it. Respect!