Wow, major ninja on my attempt to respond (must learn to type faster...).
Since we're here, though...
I think (I'll admit, I don't know where it came from) that when you see people do "@username", they mean "At username", or shorthand for "username, now I'm talking to you". Hence the use of "@username:"<paragraph> when replying to multiple people in one post. I think the idea is you can just use the person's name with no sigils when in the middle of a sentence.
I could be wrong. I don't use Twitter or IRC or stuff like that where a lot of these traditions come from.
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