Twitter Rep Hints at a Future Without At-Replies

Twitter has been doing some testing that could indicate a future without at-replies and hashtags. At the recent NewsPaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference Twitter's head of news, Vivian Schiller called at-replies and hastags 'arcane' causing a stir amongst users. When asked directly if this meant Twitter was phasing them out, she tweeted a response of 'Not at all' but remained evasive indicating that Twitter was exploring their options.

After some sleuthing, BuzzFeed found a user in Twitter's Android alpha test group app with proof that Twitter was doing some testing to connect replies via the conversation line instead of including the at-reply.

Of course, this is still a test group so there's no indication that it'll become widespread. However, it makes sense that Twitter would want to make itself more accessible to new users and cleaning up the, often complicated, Twitter language would lead to easier adoption.