Who Invented the Hashtag? Chris Messina, Not Twitter

Not Twitter. A user did: Chris Messina, a designer and developer who never worked there.

The proposal. On 23 August 2007 Messina tweeted a question: how did people feel about using the pound sign for groups, as in #barcamp? He had borrowed the habit from IRC chat rooms, where channels are named with a pound sign and a word. Two days later he wrote it up on his blog as "Groups for Twitter; or a proposal for Twitter tag channels". The word "hashtag" came a few days after that, from Stowe Boyd.

Twitter's reaction. Messina says Twitter told him the idea was "for nerds" and would never catch on. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone remembers it differently: Messina was suggesting people use tags, not asking for a feature, and Stone told him to go ahead. Both accounts agree that Twitter was not impressed and built nothing for it.

Why it spread anyway. It needed nothing from Twitter. The # key is on every keyboard, search already found the word, and a crisis gave people a reason to want one term for one event. In October 2007 Messina suggested #sandiegofire for updates about the San Diego wildfires, and it caught on.

Twitter caught up. On 2 July 2009 Twitter began turning every hashtag into a search link.

The twist. Messina never patented it. He has said hashtags are born of the internet and should be owned by no one.

Sources

• Chris Messina, "Groups for Twitter; or a proposal for Twitter tag channels" (25 August 2007) and "#Hashtag10" (Medium, 2017)
• NPR, "#HappyBirthday: Quintessential Twitter Feature Turns 10" (23 August 2017)
• Smithsonian Magazine, "A Decade Ago, the Hashtag Reshaped the Internet" (2017)
• Techdirt, "Twitter Hashtag Inventor Explains Why Patenting It Would Have Been The Wrong Thing To Do" (December 2013)
• TechCrunch, "What The Hashtag?" (6 July 2009)

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