Goodbye .@, Hello Messaging?

A single-character change highlights a massive strategic decision

When I first started using Twitter, I’d start my tweets with the names of other users. I wanted to give them credit for their ideas. I later discovered very few people even saw my tweets because of how they were composed. It was frustrating (and a little embarrassing) to learn I didn’t know how to use the service.

I suspect many new users are drifting through Twitter in this same boat of confusion. Todd Sherman undoubtedly had this problem in mind when announcing they’ll be “simplifying the rules” in how tweets are distributed:

New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.)

The change resolves a conflict between two rules that govern how Twitter distributes our tweets. One rule is that new conversations should be broadcast to all your followers. That’s a simple rule. Another rule is that tweets that begin with usernames should be distributed to only those followers-in-common between the sender and the target recipient. That’s a pretty complicated rule!

Understandably, Twitter is embracing the simple broadcast rule and jettisoning the complex rule…