Late in the day yesterday, Twitter announced a change to the home page. The "replies" tab became the "@username" tab. Essentially, this makes Twitter even more useful for online reputation management than it was before.

When it was simply "replies," it only showed users the tweets that began with "@usernamehere" but now  it shows you all tweets that have "@usernamehere" in it anywhere. This way if someone is talking about you, you can see that just as you would if they were talking to you. So, my name being CCrum237, I would see any references on Twitter made to "@CCrum237" and could then respond accordingly.

This together with Twitter’s search feature make it a lot easier to monitor your reputation within the social network. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explains why they made the update:

The @Replies feature was introduced because we noticed lots of folks putting the @ symbol in front of Twitter usernames as a way of addressing one another. For example: @biz what are you drinking in your avatar? (It’s a soy latte.) So, we started linking the @username references and collecting any tweets that began with @username on one page to make them easier to track.

However, folks started getting more inventive as they often do. Now people include @username mentions in the middle of tweets as a way to simply reference another account. For example: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston. Also, folks reference multiple accounts in a single tweet like this: I’m flying @jetblue to Boston with @ev @crystal and @goldman.

Gossiping Twitterers better be careful what they say about other people now. You don’t want to end up like Courtney Love. Stone notes that the update will be included in the Twitter APIs.