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.

~ means approximately in many places.

I prefer the pronounceability of @ over ~

Does anyone actually say the @? No one says the # in hashtags.

Aloud? Yes. Almost always in presentations especially.

the proper pronunciation of @ is 'at the rate of'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign

Incorrect, 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.

People 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.

Of course, github is just making work the things that people were already doing. But ~user predates twitter even for referring to users.

No disagreement there: 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)

It's "legacy" Apache mod_userdir. :) I think nsca used it by default before that and inherited it from the shell expansions.

~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.

I 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.

Or 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?

I would think 'not user'

deviantArt uses !username for closed accounts http://comments.deviantart.com/18/1084654/712007861

I do not like the pronouncability of that: !cpeterso would be pronounced "bang cperterso", hopefully only something that special someone in your life does.

I can appreciate the etymology (assuming you are getting this from UNIX) but it's definitely unnatural to read.

You 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."

Nothing says that you're speaking into the void more than "talking at" someone rather than "talking to" them.

But what if it's "thanks to Notepad++++'s excellent patches"?

~ is ugly and hard to type (especially on non-english keyboards).

Not harder to type than @, I think.

On 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.

Agree. 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.

While 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.

Why not just gte910h@twitter.com and gte910h@github.com?

Because those are email addresses, email addresses I do not have.

Good point, but @user@domain doesn't look like the solution to me.

Github never ceases to amaze me. Despite all the features Github has, it still manages to maintain an incredibly light and intuitive UI.

EDIT: s/seizes/ceases/

Thought you might like to know the phrase is "never ceases" not "never seizes": http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_never_seizes_to_amaz...

(Not sure if it was a typo/brainfart/not-english-speaker but figured you might like to know)

Thank you, it's the third of your options. (;

Everything they do seems so obvious once they've done it. That's the telltale sign of great idea.

I like it! Too bad it'll probably be abused, and force people to turn it off. I have high hopes for the average Github user, but it is on the Internet.

I wonder if there will be unintended consequences if this gets really popular. There always seems to be that 'one engineer' who has a combination of good architectural taste, a lot of historical knowledge, and an ability to pull out the wheat from the chaff. Currently the thing that allows them to get anything done at all is that you physically have to go over and bother them if you would like to get their input, but if they start getting a stream of mentions perhaps it would simply get turned off.

That being said, I'm all in favor of putting a user id or group id in a TODO(username) in comments so that whattodo(name)* can give me a list of things in the source base that could use my, or someone on my team's attention.

[1] implementing the whattodo command is left as an exercise for the reader.

We use @mentions internally at my company. It helps us to filter/prioritize emails that we are @mentioned in. Definitely a great handy shortcut for getting someone's attention, I hope more services adopt it.

My only wish is that you could blacklist (or whitelist) people from whom you recieve notifications, rather than have to disable the feature entirely. Otherwise this may turn into an extremely effective way to spam high-value developers.

Awesome! We've had support for this in HipChat rooms for a long time and I find myself using this syntax all over the place only to be disappointed when it doesn't actually notify people. Hopefully more apps will follow along.

this is too sweet. but as the notified, can you choose to unsubscribe?

Yep, the blogpost linked here reveals the notification center[1], which gives you a bunch of options as to what notifications you want to receive.

[1] https://github.com/account/notifications

I wish other commenting systems would implement this feature.