Digging Through Twitter's History: Origin of the @Reply
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Sunday, July 15, 2012 at 21:00 (7039/6)
Anarchogeek takes us through Twitter's past to discover why people start putting @ at the beginning of people's names instead of at the end as in an email address.
To start with the @ was used in twitter as a kind of checkin, to say where you are. The very first was by Ev, checking in to herbivore to tell us he's getting a breakfast burrito. Twitter was only 4 days old when this convention started.
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