is there a way to create an AFP link to point to any user's home directory? I would like to send a link via email to a file that everyone has in their Dropbox. The file exists on everyone's machine in the same relative location, however everyone has a different User Name.
On my machine, the file is accessible at afp://Users/scott/Dropbox/shared/example.pdf
Unfortunately, afp://~/Dropbox/shared/example.pdf does not work.

I am running Lion (10.7.1), most others are as well, a few are running Snow Leopard (10.6.x)
Well simplest way would be ~/Dropbox/shared/example.pdf (~ denotes user folder) but that will not probably work right from email.
You have to put it in Finder's 'Go to Folder...' dialog window which you can invoke with cmd+shift+G shortcut.