The Tweet That Invented the Hashtag
Twitter didn't want the hashtag. A user named Chris Messina proposed it in one tweet in 2007.
On August 23, 2007, Chris Messina posted eleven words to Twitter: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?" He was 26, a designer who had been at the first BarCamp in 2005 and wanted a lightweight way for attendees to tag their posts.
Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone reportedly pushed back. Hashtags looked like IRC channel names — something programmers understood but civilians would find hostile. The company had no plans to support them.
The shift came two months later. Wildfires spread across San Diego County in October 2007, and Nate Ritter, a local blogger, started tagging updates with #sandiegofire. Thousands of residents followed the tag to find evacuation routes and shelter information faster than local news could publish it. A convention suddenly had a utility.
Twitter quietly turned the '#' into a live hyperlink in July 2009, almost two years after Messina's original tweet. By then the pattern had already spread to Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr. Messina never patented the idea and never received a cent; he has said the point was always that it belonged to everyone.
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