July 9th, 2012
Origin of the @reply – Digging through twitter’s history
Where did the @reply come from? Why did people start putting @ at the beginning of people’s names instead of at the end as in an email address.
To start with the @ was used in twitter as a kind of checkin, to say where you are. The very first was by Ev, checking in to herbivore to tell us he’s getting a breakfst burrito. Twitter was only 4 days old when this convention started.
breakfst burrito @ herbivore. Mm!
— Evan Williams (@ev) March 25, 2006
The most common early tweet was the rather boring “@ work” although not everybody used the @ sign.
at work
— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 27, 2006
@ work
— Steve Giovannetti (@stevegio) July 21, 2006
This is the dodgeball style of doing checkins. Dodgeball, the service which is now reborn as FourSquare used a text message style syntax with @location.
Some early users tried out using the @ sign for time instead of a place.
burlesque @ 2am
— Tim Roberts (@timroberts) April 9, 2006
Some simply used @ as a generally short and cute form of saying ‘at’.
where you @
— Daniel T (@Darkside) June 29, 2006
The very first attempt to use a @name to referrer to somebody was a discussion between Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby about how to scope conversations on twitter. First Ben says:
wondering if there should be a pseudo-syntax for letting a Follower on twitter know you’re directing a comment at them.
— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006
The format ends up coming as a quick reply from NeilCrosby:
@kapowaz: probably
— Neil Crosby (@NeilCrosby) November 23, 2006
There by creating the format which would become @username on twitter for scoping conversations and replying to users. They then went on to have a bit of conversation working out the regular expressions required for matching users and tracking conversations on twitter.
@Neil Crosby: would this regex match the ‘directed message’ thing I mentioned earlier? ^@([^:]):
— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006
@Ben: ^@([^:]+): would match I think
— Neil Crosby (@NeilCrosby) November 23, 2006
Norm: does this look like it makes sense to you? /^@([^:]+):/\\1\:/
— Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) November 23, 2006
s#^@([^:]+): #twitter.com/$1 : #
— Mark Norman Francis (@cackhanded) November 23, 2006
The @reply was created on Thanksgiving day, November 23rd, 2006. 
Also see @Garrett’s own post with a few more tweets about how the @reply came about which i missed.
A few days passed and nobody was using the new @ reply format which Ben Darlow (@kapowaz) & Neil Crosby has created. The next person to try out something like an @reply was Robert S Andersen, who now interestingly enough is creative director at Square, quickly followed with a ‘reply’ by Cameron Waters, co-founder of Square.
@ Garrett: No problem! Also, I did email you about that. I’ll send you another email today with some samples.
— Robert S Andersen (@rsa) November 29, 2006
@ Bobby: Most of us don’t know what you’re talking about!
— Cameron Walters (@ceedub) November 29, 2006
@ Cameron: Ah, the magic of Twitter! Sorry.
— Robert S Andersen (@rsa) November 29, 2006
None of the folks using @ replies are using Ben and Neil’s format or even being very consistent with their twitter names. For example, today Tom Coates does use TomCoates as a twitter name, but at the time he used his blog name, PlasticBagUK.
@ Tom Coates – the exercise to stop you from smoking i believe, bastard!!! and how do i turn these mobile updates off, must look, I look sad o/wise
— Lee Wilkins (@thisiswilks) December 5, 2006
A few other people used the new way of replying, but it died out after a couple of days. It could have been gone forever, but John Hicks kept using it. Suw comes closest to the current convention, almost a month after the idea was first proposed.
@.ben: I hope your place is earthquake proof!
— Suw(@Suw) December 21, 2006
By the first week of January 2007 the @ reply with a space is getting enough adoption that there starts to be a backlash. Because it was a convention created by users, twitter wasn’t tracking or scoping the conversations with @replies to a common subset of followers.
is wondering if anybody who use @ messagge know that he can do it with D NAME and messagge, without annoying anybody else
— Luca Conti (@pandemia) January 3, 2007
Nobody could quite decide what format to use, should there be a space or not?
@ Christian – agree I learnt PHP then javascript, whats the problem… @Ben , Here have my fireaxe, go take on IE6 and you go teach it some..!
— Gary Barber (@Tuna) January 3, 2007
Sometimes people just used the bare username followed by a : without the @ at all.
celebi23: Wait, I though Macworld started on the east coast @ 12?
— Macworld (@Macworld) January 9, 2007
Eventually Brad Wright starts explaining to people that the @name convention exists elsewhere and it’s not a twitter thing at all. Of course given some time, @name will become inexorably linked to twitter.
reminds Christian that “@[name]” is a common referencing protocol on Teh Internets, and has nothing to do with Twitter.
— Brad Wright (@intranation) January 9, 2007
People get more and more upset about the @reply spam and crossed conversations.
My god, people! “@Bob” doesn’t send just to Bob. Only send “@” messages if we will ALL care about them. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
— Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) January 13, 2007
And finally KevinMarks is the first person to use @reply in it’s current form on Twitter. Ironically enough, explaining how @replies work.
@nick the point of using @ is to cue the rest of us in, and help us see why we might find nick amusing; we know how to use D
— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) January 13, 2007
Little by little people converged in to using the twitter name, not person’s name, and also not including a space between @ and the name. The colin, :, was dropped. As the use of @reply to referrer to somebody’s name instead of a place took over, and twitter added support with a link, the use of @ as a location indictor or time has dropped off.
Twitter didn’t add official support to @replies as part of the platform until May 2008, fully 2 years after twitter launched and a year and a half after the idea of @replies was proposed.
Twitter’s been around for over 6 years now, and it’s most of it’s early history has been forgotten. The amazing thing about twitter as a platform and community is that it’s evolution has come through it’s use. Through use, people together evolve new ways of communicating. The #hashtag, the retweet, the @reply, follow friday, trending topics, real time twitter search, explaining twitter trends, cc-ing users, etc… These were all creations of the user base, people tried out ideas and build them. Twitter the company later adopted the conventions of it’s community and formalized the tools.
This letting the community of users create, and then adopting the practices is critical to how Twitter’s grown to be such an amazing platform. It’s also why new efforts to deliver a ‘consistent experience‘ are a terrible idea and if they succeed will kill twitter’s future innovation.
Thanks to my good friend Kellan who put together a searchable archive of the first year of tweets letting us old timers relive the early days of twitter. These days Kellan is the CTO at Etsy, if you’re a hacker who’s in New York, or wants to live in New York, you should go work with him.
In: Uncategorized | | #
44 Comments, Comment or Ping
That’s a fascinating history, thank you for putting it together!
A bit of extra information for you: My tweet was directed to Ben Metcalfe, who at that point was going by the name .Ben. In usernames he sometimes had to expand that out to dotBen, and then later on he dropped the punctuation altogether and stuck with the full version, which he still uses.
But at that time, in day-to-day conversation he was .Ben. So when I used the @, it was actually to precede what was then his preferred name, the dot wasn’t just a random interjection.
Because Twitter didn’t highlight @username mentions, the initial convention was to use people’s first names or their most-used pseudonym, so you’ll notice that Kevin Marks doesn’t say @toomuchnick, but @Nick.
Both the @ and the : came from conventions already established on IRC, where you would direct a public response to a specific person using @username:. In IRC clients like Colloquy, you can type the first few letters of a username, then hit Tab and the software fills in the rest of the name for you, appending a colon automatically.
This convention migrated to Twitter, but without the autocomplete and the automatic addition of the colon, that bit of punctuation got dropped as it didn’t really help and sometimes you needed every character you could get.
Really love the fact that you’re documenting the early days of Twitter. It would be a shame to lose our collective history in the depths of Twitter’s archive. I remember all the conversations, particularly with Chris Messina, around what are now hashtags, too!
July 10th, 2012
“The @reply was created on Thanksgiving day, November 23rd, 2006. One wonders if this was the first case of geeks using twitter to avoid their family on thanksgiving.”
No – because the three people in that conversation are all British, not American
July 10th, 2012
people were doing @ replies, meaning “addressed to or referring to” on Flickr years before, actually.
July 10th, 2012
Ah, this was when services like Tweetdeck were so useful because they collected EVERY time someone mentioned @yourname, while twitter only collected it if it was the very first thing in the tweet.
July 10th, 2012
Fun, especially considering I know one of the participants in this history.
Next, I’d like to know the history of RT (It may have been Tim O’Reilly) … and just for fun, what was the first Twitter Spam?
July 10th, 2012
This isn’t a particularly accurate list. I’ve compiled what I believe is the correct history of the first uses of the @reply: log.maniacalrage.net/post/26935842947/the-real-history-of-the-reply-on-twitter
July 10th, 2012
You seem a bit surprised that @ was used to mean “at”. This has been a convention for over 100 years, originally for accounting.
10 widgets @ $4 = $40 which read would be “Ten widgets at $4 each…”
The symbol has been on typewriters since at least 1900. More at wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
The rest of the history on the @reply is cool though.
July 10th, 2012
This is a great ‘historical’ perspective. Thank you!!
July 10th, 2012
You should be flogged for such offensive ignorance
This began with IRC .. that and finger from which TWITter is ENTIRELY PIRATED
July 10th, 2012
Brilliant. Thank you for sharing. Always wondered how it came to be.
July 11th, 2012
i found this to be an interesting read & would like to share this with others; however, before i can do so in good conscience, might i ask if you are able to edit the penultimate paragraph to replace the improperly-used contractions “it’s” with the possessive “its” instead?
July 11th, 2012
FYI I just stumbled upon a blogpost on twitter from the 22. november 2006 which shows an @ reply in a screenshot….
blog.twitter.com/2006/11/twitter-peek.html
So that very first attempt must have happened before, no?
July 11th, 2012
I’m confused. I didn’t on Twitter till 08. Please explain why every single tweet posted above has their @handle below their name but no one referred to one another by their @handle?
July 11th, 2012
Actually, looks like Dom Sagolla did it first:
www.140characters.com/2012/06/06/first-use-of-twitter-sign/
July 11th, 2012
While I deny all knowledge of IRC, I can verify that it is (was) common to use @nick in chatrooms to identify whom you’re responding to. This goes back to 1990.
July 11th, 2012
I suspect that @kapowaz and @NeilCrosby, both being UK-based would not have needed to use twitter to avoid their families on Thanksgiving.
July 12th, 2012
Good post, Rabble. The only point I’d make is that Neil, Ben, and Norm weren’t “using twitter to avoid their family on thanksgiving”, mostly because all three are Brits and, in fact, we were all at work (Norm, Neil and I were at Y! UK, just upstairs from Coates at the time).
July 12th, 2012
Hey Major Obivious, yes we coppied irc, finger, and .plan files when we created twitter. That and TxtMob, Upoc, blogger, sms, etc… We were definately talking about how to take old unix tools and make web versions of them.
July 12th, 2012
Thanks for finally talking about >Origin of the @reply – Digging through twitter
July 12th, 2012
Thanks for this, Evan. And all the other conversations and corrections it’s spawned.
Whilst I get what you mean about Twitter’s “official” support, I thought the convention had been codified (literally) by March 2007.
I remember explaining to Jeremy Keith on one of those huge escalators at SXSW that Twitter had paved the cowpath rather than introducing that feature.
Obviously, use and patterns (and even how the code worked) changed after that, but still.
Although I may be completely wrong and that might have been 2009. The assumed maturity of understanding due to the two years in between tells me it must have been in 2007.
Can anyone remember?
July 13th, 2012
Thanks for this, I love net anthropology.
You inspired me to seek my first use of the convention, which didn’t occur until March 27th. Looking through those early tweets from 2006-7 reminded me that my circle of friends came to Twitter as an alternative to IM status messages (remember ICQ?) as a broadcast tool, and so the transfer of IRC conventions wasn’t quite natural.
Anyway, I bring it up because the tweet immediately following my first @ reply (to @gruber) was a use of the L:location convention, which I had used before and don’t recall the source of, but was using to appear on the screen of @ev, who was speaking at a small academic conference I was taking part in. I do recall that he specifically brought up that convention, encouraging the audience to tweet with L:Boulder so he could search for them. Because obviously anyone tweeting in Boulder would be in that room, and because parlour tricks were necessary to encourage Twitter (twttr?) signups.
So recent, and yet already so quaint.
July 18th, 2012
‘the evolution of #twitter or any great company has come from it’s use,’ by the people, for the people…of the people. #biztag @biztag ‘next gen’ *biztag
August 10th, 2012
Thanks man, using hashtags is a great way to get things done
August 21st, 2012
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