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