Hashtag Turns 10! #HappyBirthdayHashtag

It’s been 10 years since hashtags were first introduced to the world! Although the symbol ‘#’ has been around since maybe the invention of the keyboard itself, the use of the character to join a conversation on social media is now 10 years old.

Born only a decade ago, an average of 125 million hashtags are now shared on Twitter every single day. First invented by Chris Messina, a Google engineer at the time, hashtags were meant to be the pointy prefix to a word at the end of a message. The idea was to use hashtags as a handy way of separating messages into easily searchable terms for groups, themes or topics. While a similar concept existed in chatrooms, he was the first one to consider using the character on the powerful and scalable social media platforms. He brought a group together using the hashtag #barcamp.

The most used hashtag in 2007 was used around 9000 times whereas the most used hashtag in 2017 so far has been used over 300 million times. Ever since its humble start on Twitter, it has also been ever present on Facebook and its absence would make Instagram all but unusable.

The term hashtag was coined by blogger Stowe Boyd, three days after Messina’s message, who found it a perfect distillation of his own idea of “groupings” or “ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest implied by a tag.” Interestingly, the hashtag was not ‘invented’ for Twitter but for the Internet in general. Slowly, the world caught on to the idea of grouping and the first big hashtag campaign was started in October that year. Following a fire that had broken out in California, Nate Ridder tried to collect reports regarding the fire using the hashtag #sandiegofire which allowed many people to understand the utility of the slanted grid.

To celebrate 10 glorious years of hashtag’s uniting people all over the world, let’s take a look at what are some of the most used hashtags. 

The most tweeted television show of all times is not Game of Thrones but #TheWalkingDead, while the most tweeted about the movie is #StarWars.

The first international movement mobilized on Twitter to bring people together to work towards creating a fairer society for black people was the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The color of a dress was turned into a huge scientific experiment about how humans see color. The color of #TheDress still is a huge debate. It all started with a photo of a dress and whether it was black and blue or white and gold.

A United Nations Women’s Campaign for gender equality was started in 2014 with the aim to inspire men to understand and end inequalities experienced by women. #HeForShe turned into a platform for people to express their own battles with gender inequality in everyday life and campaign for change.

In 2017, one of the most popular hashtags was started by Carter Wilkerson in an attempt to get free chicken nuggets from Wendys. #nuggsforcarter beat Ellen Degeneres’ Oscar selfie with 3.42 million retweets!