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@, the at sign, started it’s career as a favorite amongst accountants. Then, in 1982 David Crocker wrote RFC 822, which defined that the lexical symbol “@” be present to separate the mailbox from the domain viz. person@domain.

During the 1.0 days, using an @ in a corporate brochure conveyed it’s online presence. To a large part the usage of @ was still in emails, until twitter was born 2 years ago. twitter’s @reply feature took away the symbol’s pull from the email. Now, we are seeing the people are increasingly using @ outside of twitter for calling out a conversation when threading is absent in a commenting system.

Take for example this slice of conversation from a blog:

The commenter in the above example _wants_ to talk directly to the other commenter except that the comments are laid out in single-dimension reverse chronological order.

We are noticing this new social behavior (mostly used by twitter users) where @ is being used to point to the conversation participants (eg. @anon_guy, I agree with @20, etc.). This is very popular practice amongst commenters in heavily commented blogs esp. on controversial topics where discussions sway in multiple directions. Is this a new social behavior? Does this new social behavior calls for a change in the way we see comments in the blogs? Is threading a requirement? Does threading invite more participation and 1:1 discussion between commenters within the realm of the larger topic which is the post itself? These are some interesting questions we are asking ourselves @least.