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Sometimes, I really wish the ~, rather than @, had gained popular traction for referring to users. @ already had meaning, and stuff to the right of the @ was t
by thwarted 16y ago
Sometimes, I really wish the ~, rather than @, had gained popular traction for referring to users. @ already had meaning, and stuff to the right of the @ was the location of the stuff on the left. Now there are things on both sides of an @ that indicate specific identity.
- barista 16y agoAgree. In fact if it were a ~ then we could have a full email address after that thus unlocking the identity from using a single provider.
- gte910h 16y agoWhile it doesn't look great to the eye yet, I'm pretty sure @gte910h@twitter.com vs @gte910h@github.com would work to point out the user on the site.
- gte910h 16y ago~ means approximately in many places. I prefer the pronounceability of @ over ~
- thwarted 16y agoDoes anyone actually say the @? No one says the # in hashtags.
- gte910h 16y agoAloud? Yes. Almost always in presentations especially.
- kondro 16y agothe proper pronunciation of @ is 'at the rate of'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
- gte910h 16y agoIncorrect, the historical origin of the @ symbol was a symbol this "at the rate of" use. The proper pronunciation is the one that matches the use you're using it in. So reading off an invoice from "Back in the day", you might say "at the rate of". Saying it in a user name or email address the proper way to read it is "At", as that's what people will understand.
- tesseract 16y agoOn the other hand ~ has been used to indicate a signature. A trailing colon would be the obvious choice when addressing a statement to someone, but that doesn't work as well for the Twitteresque usage of flagging a username embedded in the middle of a string in a machine-readable fashion.
- jcsalterego 16y agoI can appreciate the etymology (assuming you are getting this from UNIX) but it's definitely unnatural to read.
- pjhyett 16y agoPeople were already using the @ notation in their code comments, so it seemed like the logical way to offer additional functionality without anyone changing their behavior.
- thwarted 16y agoOf course, github is just making work the things that people were already doing. But ~user predates twitter even for referring to users.
- pjhyett 16y agoNo disagreement there: http://github.com/~pjhyett http://github.com/~pjhyett (That's legacy from the earliest days of github and I can't promise it'll be around forever, but it still makes me smile being able to do it)
- thwarted 16y agoIt's "legacy" Apache mod_userdir. :) I think nsca used it by default before that and inherited it from the shell expansions.
- ludwigvan 16y ago~ is ugly and hard to type (especially on non-english keyboards).
- adrianN 16y agoNot harder to type than @, I think.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- famousactress 16y agoI like @ but I wish it had ended up on the other side!.. like mytypicalhandle@ ... solves your problem, cause we respect the 'who'.... mytypicalhandle@gmail.com, mytypicalhandle@starbuckswhereiamthemayor... whatever.
- jrockway 16y agoYou know what? I agree with you completely, and I'm going to stop using @whoever. It made sense on twitter, when your tweet as "at whoever". But it doesn't make sense anywhere else. I liked Audrey Tang's habit of referring to people as "person++". It's positive and looks nice in conversation: "This release is thanks to foobar++'s excellent patches."
- cpeterso 16y agoOr perhaps "!user" to get user's attention? Like "hey you!" Plus !user has actual (yet conveniently uncommon) precedent from UUCP mail routing: host1!host2!host3!user And who enjoys people "talking at" them?
- schwabacher 16y agoI would think 'not user'
- Maxious 16y agodeviantArt uses !username for closed accounts http://comments.deviantart.com/18/1084654/712007861 http://comments.deviantart.com/18/1084654/712007861
- gte910h 16y agoI do not like the pronouncability of that: !cpeterso would be pronounced "bang cperterso", hopefully only something that special someone in your life does.
- glenjamin 16y ago~username has generally meant "a folder belonging to username". In non-threaded discussion boards, and I believe some older message boards @username was used to direct a particular portion of your message at a specific recipient while still keeping the message public. I keep seeing lots of hate for the proliferation of "twitter's" @mention syntax, but its use predates twitter by a loooooong way.