Jul 2009 06

Dear Twitter, @ means “at”. The correct syntax is user@ not @user. Thanks.5

Posted In The Web

For 38 years now, when you read @ anywhere online, it meant AT.

Now Twitter is the fever, and it seems that somewhere along the stampede back to a primitive form of Internet Relay Chat, the Twitter crew thought it’d be a great idea to put the AT before the username, breaking the very URL standard that made Twitter possible via REST calls originating from iPhones, Blackberrys, Androids and ubiquitous networked embedded Brainfuck devices roaming the globe on their own.

Remember, when you authenticate via REST, you’re sending Twitter a http://TWITTERSCREENNAME:password@www.twitter.com/rest/call URL.

The W3C URL spec is very clear about where the username should go:

An optional user name, if required (as it is with a few FTP servers). The password, is present, follows the user name, separated from it by a colon; the user name and optional password are followed by a commercial at sign “@”. The user of user name and passwords which are public is discouraged.

The URL system, first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, respected the Arpanet email convention, as cited above.

IRC, which is a much more advanced global conversational system than Twitter is(and will be for the foreseeable future) respects the user@destination convention.

The DNS system, probably the service closest to the core of the Internet infrastructure, substitutes the first dot for a @, but the syntax is still user.host.domain.tld, which translates to user@host.domain.tld.

Heck, even Carl Sagan’s crew respected the standard(proper_name@location) when they brought SETI@home to us all.

So, why is Twitter going against the standard with their own message addressing? Just so they can brag that they convinced a brazillion users to type ass-backwards 140-char micromessages? I’d say Twitter needs to be responsible with their new midiatic powers and adapt to the standard, so that younger users typing in Twitter replies can become awesome hackers like Jon@Postel.org, not @Jon.

SomeUser@ is the correct syntax when replying to Tweets, meaning you’re addressing a shortcut for SomeUser@twitter. Writing @myname turns people into places and leaves me wondering what the heck should go before the @.

“Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”
– jon

5 Comments

  1. Josho says:
    July 7, 2009 at 11:10 am

    Erm… I think you got the REST URI format wrong?

  2. admin says:
    July 7, 2009 at 11:53 am

    You’re right, thanks for pointing that out.
    Best wishes. Ze

  3. Tom says:
    July 7, 2009 at 6:11 pm

    This is probably the stupidest thing ever. user@ makes no sense, but @user does because you are directing your tweet AT a user.

  4. admin says:
    July 7, 2009 at 6:28 pm

    Tom, thanks for your input. If user@ made no sense, why would it be good enough for the examples I cited, a robust 38-year-old email technology among them? Twitter’s motto is “what are you doing now?”, do you think that replying that question AT someone is the most natural way of saying it? “So AT Tom, I’m currently blogging about something here.”. You see, it is not natural. It’s a stretch to justify it like that, IMHO.

    Another consideration here is something called “a convention”. The Internet is based on conventions that we all respect. Society has convened that certain symbols have certain meanings, among them, online at least, the symbol @ means “AT an online location”, normally a mail exchanger for some larger network. So if you want to stretch it a bit and accept Twitter’s standard that @ is no longer a location but a person you’re referring “AT”, then we are changing an existing convention here. A 4 decade old one at that.

    I stand by my criticism: I think Twitter did this to be different and I don’t think it was a good move. Everyone can tell that Joe@ is a name, who needs a @ prefix to know that a statement is directed AT someone? But we do need an @ symbol to separate a person from their location, a username from a host name.

    I still think Twitter’s choice of prefix was unfortunate, @ has a clear meaning online: after @ comes a location not a person. If you want to change that, then we have some RFC’s to pore over for quite some time.

    Regards,
    Ze

  5. Dom says:
    December 2, 2010 at 1:44 am

    I completely agree, and mostly as per your last sentence, “Writing @myname turns people into places and leaves me wondering what the heck should go before the @.” I can share that thought/leaving-feeling 100% with you.

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