Maybe that's part of the reason I can never figure out what's going on when I follow someone's link to a conversation on Twitter.

This is the bane of my existence when it comes to Twitter.

Why are you even allowed to have 2 names anyway? The real one(the one in your url,.e.g. twitter.com/<realacctname>) and that $WHATEVER_STRING_YOU_WANT username?

Idea, someone make an extension/greasemonkey that replaces all the free-form usernames with the actual account name so I can follow conversations without having to deal with all the mental bookkeeping of 2 names per user in conversational thread.

Some of the reader apps will let you choose which one gets displayed, or displayed most prominently.

Twitter, I'll never understand... I have a theory you need the brain to be wired differently.

Meh, twitter makes sense to me when you understand two things:

1) It's fully public, and everything you're a fan of uses it.

This makes it fantastic for building a feed of stuff you follow in tiny, tidy, bite-sized messages where one overactive wall-of-text can't slow you down as you drink from the firehose of info.

2) It came out of SMS. That means it keeps the limits of SMS, like short messages and usernames and whatnot. Imho they should break out of this box a bit - move tags and people out of the message body and swap names into the UI.

Something twitter is doing right is the ability to expand the convo right there in the timeline. I'll give them that.