I’ve seen an interesting, and maybe alarming, trend of using a person’s twitter username prefixed with an ‘@’ to refer to a person almost everywhere on the web. Granted, this is only happening in the highly interconnected early adopter circles that both blog and are well-known tweeters. But that’s the sort of thing, and the sort of crowd, that spreads out to others over time.
Better get your favorite Twitter username while it’s still available, or you’re going to be @smileybob1992039…
7 Comments
there is an idiot who has zac@twitter.com… and he only posted like 4 times, over a year ago…
I would like to remove him from this planet and take his twitter id.
Nah, it’s happening everywhere. My community were doing it on Flickr before Twitter, but everybody does it a lot more there now. We’re building it into a current app because I can’t actually believe that other apps haven’t taken Twitter’s step of codifying this convention and making it useful.
But @lachlanhardy (see what I did there?), how often do you refer to someone by their flickr username outside flickr? Maybe I missed your point and you’re saying you started using @flickr_username all over the web. If so, I must’ve just been blissfully unaware.
@sblom (omg you’re so right!), I think @lachlanhardy is saying that his userbase was using @flickr_username as their global namespace BEFORE twitter. Most likely they’ve since switched.
Its definitely a tech thing, though. I still talk to Normals who use their Myspace SEARCH TERMS to identify themselves, though.
“Yeah, I’m on myspace. Search for “katy 3 lawrence, kansas” and you’ll find me.”
That same mentality is taken to extremes in Japan where they are using Google search terms instead of even URLs
http://www.cabel.name/2008/03/japan-urls-are-totally-out.html
I found it more than just a little disturbing when the official Vidoop Announcement of Chris and me getting hired linked to our Twitter profiles, as if those were our authoritative profiles on the web. Even the RRW article got it right by linking to our personal websites.
(oh, and wp-openid 2.2.1 is out and it fixes the quote issue)
^^ wow, those links in my previous comment are just about impossible to see with this color scheme. :-\
Sam, there was a company called RealNames that set out to get everyone to surf to every site using plain words instead of URLs. I can think of a dozen reasons why it might have failed, but I’m not sure which reasons are the real ones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames
Will, yeah–the color scheme does leave something to be desired. I’ll file a ticket to fix that. Thanks for fixing the quote issue so quickly!