A mention (also known as @replies or tagging) is a means by which a blog post references or links to a user's profile. This may be done as a matter of getting the attention of (or drawing attention to) another user of a social networking or blogging service, as a matter of replying to the other user's post, or as a matter of "tagging" a user in a post (i.e., to say that "Jay Thompson was here").

Styles and history

@ (at sign)

The rise to prominence of

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

from its launch in 2006 gave rise to using the

at sign The at sign, , is normally read aloud as "at"; it is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign. It is used as an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14), but ...

("@") as a description for directing a public post to a particular user, especially for the purpose of replying to another user's post (i.e., "@janedoe"). Only after the usage of @ as a visual means of directing posts to specific users gained currency among Twitter users did Twitter developers begin to integrate the @ sign as a fundamental conversational tool on the site. Initially, @ was used by Twitter users occasionally as

shorthand Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek ''st ...

for other words, such as location or time. The first person to use @ as a description of directing a post at another user was Robert S. Andersen ("rsa") on 2 November 2006; initially, this usage made use of a space between the @ and the name, followed by a colon and the main content. The first to propose a general syntax for directly addressing users in posts were Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby, and by January 2007, more Twitter users began to take notice of the practice with various degrees of acceptance; within the year, the convention trended toward combining the @ and a Twitter username (as opposed to a real name) and prepending the combination to the beginning of a post in order to indicate a reply. Ultimately, they became colloquially known as "@replies" for their primary usage as replies to other users' posts. Twitter added support for "@replies" beginning in May 2008, with any combination of @ with a username being turned into a hyperlink to the profile. On March 30, 2009, Twitter updated the feature and renamed it "Mentions" (i.e., to "mention" user "@janedoe") so as to include non-reply posts directed at individual users. Beginning September 2009,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

integrated the at sign as a mentioning feature; typing "@" in a post automatically initiates a drop-down

autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the ta ...

list containing names of "friends", groups and

pages Page most commonly refers to: * Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to: Roles * Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation * Page (servant), traditionally a young mal ...

, which, after one being selected and the post published, links to the profile, group or page. @-replies started being used on Wikipedia around 2013. YouTube started introducing @-handles in late 2022.How to Claim Your YouTube Handle
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+ (plus sign)

The plus sign ("+") was utilized on

Google+ Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...

to select a user or page.

References

{{Microblogging Microblogging Twitter