Twitterese - messing with convention (mini rant)

I'm not on Twitter, since I have no shortage of places to express myself and since bits don't weight anything and since I don't make a habit of texting (it's not free for me) I don't feel remotely obligated to limit my musings to 140 character "Tweets" or less (in fact I think I'm past that already).

What's weird to me is Twitter trying to usurp commonly understood email nomenclature and it's messing with my head.

Quoting from the help (http://help.twitter.com/portal)

What are @Replies?
An @reply is a public message sent from one person to another, distinguished from normal updates by the @username prefix. If a message begins with @username, we collect it as a reply. Reply publicly to any update on Twitter by using the @username format.
-------

So someone from Twitter talking to me on Facebook will address me at @ellen. Now I speak email and internet nomenclature pretty well, so to me, the name comes BEFORE the @ and the domain comes after. @ellen means you're turning me into a domain name and it's jarring every single time. There are so many other design approaches they could have taken. Mucking with the well understood @ symbol, smacks of laziness to me especially since a # or a $ or % or & or <> or + heck even a ~ or -- would have worked fine.

I'm not a domain name.