Comment by ggm
3 hours ago
I wrote to google asking to get basic boolean primitives in circles. So you could organise a secret birthday party for "@friends not josh" but got nothing back.
Given the engine logic behind search has this, it felt like no brainer.
I developed a TinyMUCK-based messaging system like this.
You see, the original TinyMUD eventually had a "whisper" command where you could send a private message to someone in the same room. They also had a "page" command where you could summon someone remotely, and it did not originally send a message. People hacked this command by renaming their room so that the name of the room was the message.
Eventually, "page" and "whisper" converged as providing the same functionality. And of course we had "say" and "pose" commands for public in-room communication. What we didn't have was a command for excluding one or more persons from the conversation.
So I invented the "mutter" command. If you typed "+mutter <player>=<message>" then everyone in the room would see your message, except for the player(s) named on the command-line.
It was extraordinarily rude and tacky, and therefore an unmitigated success, and became well-integrated and nearly well-known as "whisper" after awhile. Obviously, Facebook and other social media have merely followed my lead!
Look, I'm not proud of my legacy as a hacker, but sometimes you give people what they want...