It is up to the individual. And everyone is different. As with your example, I would see that “Thanks!” and think “I wonder what that is about. Oh well, at least that @jdistraction person is polite.” See, to me it is very individualized but I think it is a bummer that Twitter just took that easy way to reply away from us. I might even go so far as to check into who the person is that is replying and maybe end up following them. I really think it is different for different people. It really depends on how and why you are using Twitter. If it is so private that you don’t want others to see it or you don’t want to clutter up people’s streams send a DM. Because people besides the person you “@” see it just not as many as used to see it (when it is the first word in the tweet). So if you consider it clutter you are still “cluttering” someone’s stream.

I know I keep saying it, but I keep circling around to this: it all depends on how you want to use Twitter and what it is to you.

My friend Kevin, who I know IRL, stopped following me because he doesn’t allow for any type of #FollowFriday in his Twitter stream. See? That is what he wants and that is his choice. He uses Twitter totally different than I do.

I want to help and be helped and I think that all kinds of stuff on Twitter is interesting. I might just Tweet something I don’t think is interesting, but I think that some of the people I am following might like it.so I might tweet.

I think your tweets are hilarious, plus I love your blog and I like to share it with others. Did you see my rule regarding reading your blog? I advised people not to have anything in their mouth. I don’t want them spitting it out all over.

Thank you, as always for stopping by AND for commenting. You are awesome and I appreciate you!

In the meantime… I would say that it’s good to make a decision each time your replying as to whether or not you lead with the @ (making your reply more targeted) or lead with words before it so that all your followers can see. Not every reply makes sense to have generally visible. For instance if all I want to say is “thanks!” it doesn’t make sense to make my “thanks” generally visible. No one knows what I’m thanking you for and I feel I’m just cluttering up my followers screens. On the other hand, if I want to say, Thanks @helpyouwell for your excellent post, and include a link, then, yes, definitely, share it with everyone. I’ve followed many great links that way.

You and John are good about sharing links and useful information. I love following you!

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for adding information.

(Have a great day!)

I might also add that when you reply to someone you must remember to put the @ directly in front of the person’s name (eg: @HelpYouWell). If you leave a space (eg: @ HelpYouWell) the reply won’t go into that person’s reply column.

Also, if you accidentally start a comment too close to the person’s name (eg: @HelpYouWellHave a good day!) again, your comment won’t be delivered to that person’s reply column.

Thanks for stopping by, thanks for commenting—oh, make it a TRIPLE thank you, thank you for more information.

In regards to “user settings” where do you set that? Is this on other programs besides twitter.com or somewhere I am not seeing on twitter.com?

Again TRIPLE thanks!

When starting to use twitter, and you don’t know who is on there, it is helpful to set it to view all the @replies because that allows you to quickly find others that you may know and/or with whom you share interests. Later, after you have a ton of people, it can be helpful to stop seeing all @replies because it just becomes too much to handle.