The @tag should work as a communication tool across the web, not just on Twitter.

Aaron Chua, Why social tags are more powerful than tags:

The evolution of tagging as an organisation tool to a social gesture mechanism is an important one.

As a social gesture, tagging has become more viral and people centric. Its communicative nature has open up new ways which coordination can be done.

My comment:

Great point; using tags for communication could be a very powerful way to point data towards people. Imagine if someone could point information or communicate with me simply by using the @tdavidson tag, or I could pick up any bit of data tagged @tdavidson on any platform (web, micro-message et. al.), not just Twitter?

Running a Google Blogsearch or Backtype comment search for @tdavidson simply doesn’t work well enough. Yet.

I take that back, it actually works ok; and extending the reach using Yahoo Pipes to include Flickr, Friendfeed, Twitter and Delicious increases the utility; check out my quick hack of an @me service on Yahoo Pipes.* It would be pretty simple to extend this to allow people to input their own @name, select which services they want to search, filter the results to exclude duplicate results and then select their desired way to receive the results from a variety of push and pull methods. But that’s for real hackers to do…

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* I excluded the Twitter @replies because I already receive them through other means…