Twitter Likely to Dump the @ Symbol

It seems Twitter is close to doing away with the @reply, leaving response to tweets exactly the way its  typed.

Often times twitter conversations gets confusing, especially for new users because of the possibility of moving perfectly logically ordered tweets around in the timeline so they no longer appear in the order they were said, therefore making  it a little difficult  to see who’s saying what to who.

The Picture below is from a current Android beta test showing the floating replies handily annotated by Buzzfeed

Removing it will mean that when you reply a tweet, instead of the usual @username that comes with the reply, you only have the reply floating on the timeline.

Apparently this would make things “easier to understand” for new Twitter users.