Twitter is based on talking, either to "everybody" (who follows you) or to specific recipients (people you follow).
This works fine, but has some nasty bugs:
- If someone mentions more than one twitter account ("@person1 and @person2"), only person1 will be notified of the reply perfectly.
- If someone mentions a twitter account that is not following him, they won't see the tweet (message).
This is something that should be fixed, but until twitter folks decide to do so, there are other ways to find all messages sent to you, even if you don't follow the senders.
The easiest way is to use http://search.twitter.com/advanced, the Twitter Search page in advanced mode. The "Referencing this person" field is where you place your twitter account name... and that's all!
You can save the url to check it often, for example this is mine: http://search.twitter.com/search?&ref=kartones">http://search.twitter.com/search?&ref=kartones
And you can also feed the query to your RSS reader (this is what I do so I don't have to check any page). Once again, quite easy to modify the querystring to your account without even entering the search page: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+@kartones
Simple, once you know it.
Another nice way to get them is to use a reply notifier, like TWPLY, which sends emails when someone mentions you. Thanks to Angus Logan for pointing it out via twitter!