I believe that it still means “at”. You’re addressing the person after the ”@” sign. So you’re saying, “At Mritty This is a good question.” See what I’m saying.

As far as how it started. I believe that the concept began when services like twitter began. When you wanted to reply to a friend on twitter you would put @username then your message and it would be a “reply” to them. Hope this explains it a bit.

It dates back to the earliest days of the Internet, c. 1979. The idea was a user was at (@) his machine. It’s been around ever since.

See Twitter.

By putting an @ in front of a person’s name there, then that person gets a copy of the tweet. So, on Twitter, it’s not only used to direct a comments at someone directly, but just even to talk about them in the 3rd person (and bring them into earshot).

I was wondering the same thing!

In my head, I hear “at Joe”.

syz, right, so do I. Maybe my dialect is weird, but “at Joe” just doesn’t make sense to me. The phrase is “To Joe”, in my mind. I guess maybe it’s short-hand for “Directed at Joe….”?

@MrItty, I think you’re on the right track.

For myself on Fluther, there was a time when I preceded any one’s username with an @ so as to make it clear I was talking about a person. Since usernames need not have Proper Capitalization, my goal was to make it clear when I was referring to a @person, even if his/her name was something like a @verb, an @adjective, or @random_collection_of_letters.

We discussed that practice at length in some thread or other, and I’ve since accepted the proposal to simply bold the username of a person I’m talking about and not to.

It still means “at” to me.

@ MrItty: I read it as “at Mritty.”

That hasn’t changed. It still means at. At just has more context.

Since Twitter came arround!

To me @<persons name> would still mean At Joe. But if I think about it, it’s more like “Directed Towards Joe” I basically got it from twitter though, when you reply it says ”@Username”

@ means “at” to me. Apart from Fluther I have seen other places over the net that people use it for the same purpose. I never felt comfortable with this usage of @ though!

Mritty: I actually prefer doing it this way instead. Not because I have anything against the @ sign. Mostly because (purely for aesthetics), I don’t like to begin my sentences with a sign. Not unlike how I hate beginning a sentence with a number too.

@Nimis 1, I totally understand what you mean. 2, this annoys me too. 3, I’m still gonna do the @ thing because…. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m a bit autistic and don’t wanna change. Or just bullheaded. =)

‘at sign’ doesn’t quite flow off the tongue. How about ‘swirly-Q’?

Thank you for asking this! I had been wondering. If it helps, the @ sign is above the number 2 on the keyboard, so maybe we can pretend the person just hit the shift key? Of course, then we get into the whole annoying thing about using the number 2 to mean “to” in text speak and I don’t want to go there. :)

See this Wikipedia article.