The History of HashTag – Hashtag Origins
It was the nostalgic 90s. Our nation was prospering rapidly and the middle-class folks had started getting
their hands on the money. The elite class gadgets were now becoming a reality
of the middle class, and we had such a dream come true as a corded landline
telephone.
It was the time when the frequent blank calls
meant that your darling daughters are getting attention from the Romeos of the
town.
Our landline was not the one with a circular
rotator but it had a modern keypad and for the first time on the same keypad, I
came across this strange
Symbol #, which was giving company to 0 along with * but
its usability was unknown to us. For my eight-year child's brain, it was
analogous to the Joker in the deck of cards.
During the initial days of Twitter, people were learning the power of
expressing their opinion on the internet and it opened a door for global
communication but there was a desperate need for a group organizing framework.
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Chris Messina, a product designer working in
Silicon Valley came up with this idea of the hashtag. He tweeted on the 23rd of August
2007
How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups? As in #barcamp [msg]?
And like any other new idea or opinion, it
was not welcomed by the people of the internet, this idea was even rejected by
Twitter saying that it is a nerdy thing doesn't have the potential to be a
mainstream phenomenon.
But Twitter was wrong, later in October of
the same year, a friend of Chris was posting about the San Diego wildfire, Chris
asked him to add the hashtag San Diego fire to his tweets and as Darwin
suggests our forefathers were apes and monkeys, people started copying the same hashtag it also gained traction when
conservatives used it too.
Encourage Congress to vote in favor of an
energy bill.
Two years later Twitter licked its own spit
and added an option to search for hashtags and it turned out that lots of
people wanted to have their opinions heard and they wanted to be part of a
global conversation.
Hashtags are now used by millions across
All social media
marketing platforms they act as a driving force behind the
biggest social movements of our times like #metoo and
#blacklivesmatter. Now a day’s hashtag is the most important
ingredient in the recipe of internet Activism.
The reason behind the evolution of the
hashtag tells us about the basic human tendency that we are social animals and
we want to group together with like-minded people.
There are two takeaways from Chris Messina's story that believe in your idea even if the Giants of your field don't give a
hack about it and a friend can be an asset use them other than to tell and
listen to the drunken crazy stories.
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