Take the tour ×  I follow a corporate account that uses that
channel to reply to users of their products.  Sometimes they
reply to some user I am not following, and I see that tweet in
my timeline, there is no space or any other character before the
@ symbol, so I shouldn't be seeing it.   Does anybody know if
this is a bug in twitter, a known issue, or a trick used by that
account to make their tweets more visible?  share|improve this
question add comment  1 Answer  up vote 4 down vote accepted
Because the tweet in your example is not a reply (note that it
doesn't show the tweet they're replying to). A tweet is
considered a reply when you click the "reply" function in the
website or a Twitter client. This sets the in_reply_to_status_id
parameter of the tweet, which is how Twitter knows it's a reply
to a specific tweet. If you simply begin typing, even if there's
a @username right at the start, the in_reply_to_status_id
parameter is not set, so Twitter doesn't consider it a reply and
people who follow you wi