Nowadays in my Twitter feed I have started seeing Tweets with a preceding . (dot) in them. I don't know why they do so. Here is such an example.

Why are they wasting their one character for .? Especially if they already have a limit of 140 characters?


If you start a Tweet with "@username" then only that person and people following you and that person will see the Tweet.

If you want to be seen to be addressing a particular person then adding something before the "@username" is the simplest way to do it.

You could do something like:

Did you know @username ...


Hi, @username ....

but these would take up even more characters from the rest of the message. A single character takes up the least space and a dot is the least obtrusive.

It's all about bragging to your followers. You are saying "Look, I'm in a conversation with @username" :)

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