It is believed to date back to Roman times as writers scrawled the abbreviation "lb" over and over again, adding a line above to indicate it was a contraction for the word "libra pondo" or "pound in weight," Anoosh Chakelian notes in a history of the hashtag published in the New Statesman in As typewriters took over from scribes, the symbol began to also be used as a generic symbol for numbers don't forget your 2 pencil , and later made its way to touch-tone telephones, Chakelian writes.
But when Messina first introduced the hashtag on Twitter, it was not warmly received by the social media site. In , Messina told the Wall Street Journal 's Elana Zak t hat Twitter purportedly told him that "these things are for nerds" and it wouldn't be adopted widely. Twitter was wrong. He got the idea of using a hashtag from Internet chat rooms that had a pound symbol in front of them. He decided to pitch the idea to Twitter, but the company told him it was "nerdy" and that it would never catch on.
In October of , one of his friends was tweeting about a San Diego wildfire. Chris asked him to add sandiegofire to his tweets. It didn't take long for others to start using the same hashtag. When Instagram launched in , users started tagging photos with hashtags like nofilter or yolo. That someone was Chris Messina , who in , had an idea he thought could make then newly launched Twitter easier to use: Put a pound symbol in front of words or phrases in tweets in order to filter them by topic and maybe even make them searchable.
While it's impossible to estimate the number of hashtags on social media today, if Messina received a penny for every time someone posted on Instagram with the hashtag " love" alone one of the web's most popular tags and with over 1.
In , Twitter was a year old and Chris Messina was a tech product designer running his own internet consulting company. Messina and his Silicon Valley friends were using Twitter, but found the endless, unorganized scroll of tweets made it next to impossible to isolate groups of messages around a certain topic. Messina thought if people used the same word or phrase and put the hash symbol in front of it that could "create an instant channel that anybody can join and participate in" in the conversation, Messina tells CNBC Make It.
He picked the pound sign as a nod to the chat platform Internet Relay Chat IRC that he and many of his friends in tech used to communicate at the time. IRC featured various channels, where users chatted about relevant topics similar to newer platforms like Slack, Messina says and the channel names were also preceded by a pound symbol.
Messina set out to see if he could get other Twitter users on board with his hashtag idea. In August , he tweeted a question to his followers asking how they felt about using the pound symbol to make it easier to follow conversations about specific topics.
More than a decade later, that somewhat prophetic tweet has more than 10, "likes" and nearly 5, retweets, but Messina tells CNBC the post mostly received "mixed reviews" at the time. The tweet references BarCamp, a series of tech workshops that Messina helped create. Of course, at that point, putting a hashtag in front of a word or phrase in a Twitter post did not automatically create a channel or link to anything. So Messina wrote a 2,word proposal for his hashtag idea — including mock ups of how he envisioned the hashtagged channels would look — and he took it to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.
Stone who subsequently left and then returned to the company in an unspecified role in wrote in a Medium post that Messina walked into Twitter's "grungy office" and pitched the hashtag idea to Stone and a few other Twitter employees while they "were working frantically to fix a tech issue that had brought Twitter down, as was often the case in those early days. Messina says that the preoccupied Stone "probably half-listened to my idea and then kind of dismissed it out of hand as being something that was too nerdy that would never catch on.
Messina kept promoting hashtags through his own social media accounts and in conversations with friends. Then that October, Messina convinced a friend named Nate Ritter to use hashtags in his tweets posting information about a San Diego wildfire, and pretty soon other Twitter users were following suit in order to keep track of tweets sharing news about the wildfire.
The event ended up being an "important test case" for Messina's idea, he says, and Wired even wrote an article about the phenomenon that helped create more awareness of how hashtags could be used on Twitter. From there, Messina convinced some third-party developers who were building apps for Twitter users to add support for hashtags to their apps.
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