In many cases where people have responded to me, given my moniker of "Sofware Monkey", people have chosen "@Monkey: ...", which makes sense. Likewise, if Jeff Cho and Jeff Atwood had both commented, I might use "@Atwood: ...".
It seems like it would be very useful to do an ends-with match as well as the current starts-with match for identifying comments for notification.
Alternately, if no match is found with Starts-With, perhaps it could try again with Contains.