On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Nick Arnett <[email protected]> wrote: > > Perhaps it helps to think about a tool that extracts the tagged text from > links. Would it make sense to end up with text that omits the @ sign? Not > really,
I disagree. There's really nothing useful about the @ sign except to signify that you are referencing a username. The only meaningful way to use the data is to just use the text part (e.g. create a link to their twitter profile, or do a lookup in an app database, etc), so having to further remove the @ sign that a tool might hand me is a waste of cycles, imho. If you really want a username with an @ in front of it, it's trivial to tack it on the front. I can see your protocol argument, but in this case, it's not really a protocol but a convention signifier, and I think it's more aesthetically pleasing to have it unlinked (again, personal opinion). I wonder what drove this decision for the twitter UI team when they decided to link usernames on the main site? -Chad
