Why Do People on Twitter Use ^?


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Why do people (usually companies) use ^ to display who wrote the tweet?

Why not any other sign? I would have thought - would have looked better...

Can you take a screenshot of what you mean? I don't really use Twitter and I'm at work.

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It's not used to quote others, for example, if I was to post something on the Oxford Pride twitter account, I would write something like "Looking forward to June, a lot of great events planned ^DL"

The ^DL allows people that read the feed to differentiate between the different people they may be communicating with on the one twitter account.

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The ^DL allows people that read the feed to differentiate between the different people they may be communicating with on the one twitter account.

Well that is odd then. Pretty much everywhere else they would have used a dash...

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Well that is odd then. Pretty much everywhere else they would have used a dash...

It's just a convention. Like in most places to refer to someone in a message, I may do something like

"Intrinsica: It's just a convention"

On twitter I would do

"@Intrinsica It's just a convention"

I guess by using a character not usually used in the messages themselves, it allows easier automated analysis of tweets

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It does, and I imagine they chose to use @Name in that format for similar reasons: it's easier to automatically parse the messages for those mentions, whereas : would occur more in the body of the message itself.

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@XboxSupport also use this symbol a lot. It's ^ followed by initials. E.G: ^ZB

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Its used to identify who is posting on the twitter feed (multiple people using it). Many times carrier support (Bell, Rogers, Telus, Etc) or Banks (BMO, Scotiabank) will use them. But I do agree the ^ is weird. Why not *SL or -SL, ^SL looks off.

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