Twitter has tweaked their sidebar to now refer to Replies as “Mentions,” and adjusted the functionality so that rather than showing only those tweets that begin with your username, they’ll show all tweets that mention it.

While this could already easily be accomplished using Twitter search, or through a client like TweetDeck, it now allows all users of the Web interface – still the most popular method for updating and tracking Twitter – to see everyone who mentions their username.

Twitter’s Biz Stone further explains the move in a blog post: “In your Twitter sidebar you’ll now see your own @username tab. When you click that tab, you’ll see a list of all tweets referencing your account with the @username convention anywhere in the tweet—instead of only at the beginning which is how it used to work. So for me it would be all mentions of @biz. For developers, this update will also be included in the APIs.”

This also means you should also start to see all of the retweets that you generate, since those always start with something along the lines of “RT @adamostrow” or “Retweet @adamostrow.”

A small change on the surface, but one that will give Web users a much better idea of who’s tweeting about them – if they weren’t already getting this information in some alternative way.