Where is the first use of @reply on Fluther?

Fluther’s first @reply occurred at 2007–06-18 01:57:45 GMT when elliottcable responded to ezraglenn‘s answer about photons.

Twitter’s use of the @reply predated this one.

I knew a mod would answer this. Thank goodness. Who else would know, Rich? Really… Well, maybe elliottcable and ezraglenn would. =)

As far as I know the practice started over at Digg.

Why does it seem like some people dont know how the whole @ thing works. If your listing a bunch of users, theres no need to put @ before each users name.

you dont need to write @jp,@allie@sferik you can just put 1 @ and then list. think about it if you were to say at instead of @ it would make no sense. Shouldnt @ only go at the beginning as well? IE i wouldnt say i agree with what @johnpowell said, i would just say i agree with johnpowell. But on the otherhand if i was talking directly to him it would say

@johnpowell i believe your right.

just my two cents.

We’ve talked about automatically linking @replies to that user’s previous answer in the thread. What do you think?

@sferik
I don’t think threads get long enough right now to bother with it. And usually the @****** is the previous response anyway. Maybe a quote feature would be nice.

@sferik
i like that idea, only problem is, what if the user has multiple replies in the same thread, but your only referencing one of them. How would it know which one to link to?

I’m not sure if linking to them is best. I don’t really want to open the thread in a new tab to read one response. You could try using something like Lightbox to display the single response in the current window.

@uber, I hear ya re: preceding each user’s name with the @.

I hear ya especially as it’s a practice I tend to employ with regularity… probably annoying the crap out of you all the time.

In my mind, I’ve extended the @ to explicitly denote a user’s name… not just to talk “at” him/her/them.

So, even if I’m not talking “at” a person, I’ll still list them here as @uberbatman, @johnpowell, @sferik. It’s my little way of ensuring that everyone watching understands that I’m talking about a person and not some weirdly spelled thing.

Don’t be hatin’, yo!

@robmandu
DRIVES ME CRAZY
why not just bold their names or something?

hmm… I’ll try it, uberbatman. See how it goes.

So many of our user names are all lowercase. I guess that’s why I feel some could be confused as things, not people.

I could also try using proper capitalization, but then I feel like the person chose all lowercase on purpose… and so I wouldn’t want to wreck their artistic expression. ;-)

Twitter technique would require the use of @ for all user names, assuming you want those folks mentioned to see the tweet. But, this ain’t Twitter. Nor does Fluther auto-link the resulting name in your quip, like Twitter does.

Before we get into a more complex @reply system (which I agree, threads don’t get long enough… unless we’re writing a book), I’d like to see more formatting options, like:

* Bullet points

> Block quotes

//code//

.etc

Answers can be messy sometimes.

Seconding richardhenry‘s suggestion. More textile options would be nice… esp. //code//.

@robmandu: I just made that one up, I’m sure there’s a more established format that I’m unaware of. I haven’t seen it though, even on services like Writeboard.

ahhhh perfect robmandu i lurve you ^_^

Perhaps adopting an @ before every username wouldn’t be a bad idea, if it automatically created a link to their profile. That would get people quickly adopting a system. The text wouldn’t even have to remain @robmandu either, it could come up with a tiny icon of a jelly fish to the left of the link

…and just say robmandu

…stupid iPhone. What’s with the weird last line bug by the way? On the iPhone site? It’s been around forever and I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

Hmm… I don’t actually ever remember to do that @ thing. Its never been integrated in to my web vocabulary.

as a followup to richardhenry’s suggestions, I think it would be nice to have a “quote this” button. but, then again, I guess it would tend to make a thread longer to read since you would be doubling the amount of text, so nevermind.

i have mentioned this before, but if you could reply to an answer and it show up just beneath that answer, slightly indented, then there would be almost no need for the @replies….except for maybe within the reply thread, but i guess you could reply to a reply thread as well. it wouldn’t necessarily have to be collapsible in the beginning, that might be something to change when the threads get bigger. i think this might also solve the flarguments problem that has been discussed before.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people using the @reply method—i use it, too. it’s just that it can get confusing in the longer threads where you have to scroll back up because you forgot what so-and-so is @replying about.

More importantly, we should have dates on replies!

And relative time should only go back two weeks, or something small. “1 year ago” could mean anywhere up to the day before two years, and it’s silly.

My 2¢

Aside from all of the above Fluther is amazing

richardhenry
yep!