Hashtag celebrates its 10th birthday
In March 2007, Chris Messina was among the many in Austin, Texas, sending tweets from what was then a relatively obscure conference called South by Southwest.
At the same time, his friends in San Francisco were getting annoyed as their Twitter feeds filled with messages about a gathering they had deliberately chosen not to attend.
So in the months that followed, Messina and others tried to figure out how to make the emerging social media platform more useful. How, they wondered, could they create a signal so that users could see only the tweets they were interested in?
Some advocated the creation of a Twitter forum. But Messina wanted to create something even simpler. Another chat platform was using pound signs to denote channels, and that gave him an idea.
He sent a tweet, 10 years ago, asking Twitter users what they thought about adding a pound sign before a topic like “barcamp” — another event popular among people in the technology industry.
It was “the simplest idea that could work,” Messina, 36, a product designer from San Francisco, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. It gave people a tool, he added, that would enable them “to participate in a powerful way on social media.”
A decade later, an average of 125 million hashtags — as those pound signs came to be known — are shared every day around the world on Twitter, the company said. Indeed, Messina had given birth to a tool that would infiltrate our vernacular, aggregate conversations and, yes, fill screens with unnecessary, meaningless garble.
Hashtags have proved most useful for filtering conversations about events exactly like South by Southwest. Take the Super Bowl, for instance, which Twitter said is the most tweeted sporting event hashtag in the United States; or consider how hashtags help you find photos from your friend’s wedding — or even let you see the best shots of a hugely hyped eclipse.
To be clear, you don’t need to use hashtags to conduct a filtering search on Twitter. And if millions of people are tweeting about a new “Star Wars” trailer, all at the same time, the odds that your tweet will surface and find a huge audience are minuscule.
But Robert Hernandez, a digital journalism professor at the University of Southern California, said “there is still something wonderful” about watching a community come together in real time “only because of a hashtag.”
Hernandez pointed to yesallwomen, which allowed hundreds of thousands of strangers to discuss violence against women and reveal their anger and horror about abuse and sexism. Messina cited blacklivesmatter as an example of a hashtag that is “powerful and necessary.”
He doesn’t think badly of people who use waffle to label a photo of a waffle. That person is “trying to express something,” he said, and you have to take the good with the bad.
Hernandez is also a fan of hashtags; he’s a co-founder of a weekly Twitter forum about online journalism called wjchat. But he acknowledged that they can grate and irritate.
“Like anything that becomes popular — especially if it was organic and grass roots — corporations take it over and incorporate it into marketing,” Hernandez said. People are unlikely to use hashtags created by brands, he added, no matter how much they are promoted.