It’s time to bake a cake and light some candles. Today is the offical tenth birthday of the hashtag. Created by tech evangelist Chris Messina, he saw it as a way to create groups on the individually-focussed Twitter platform. His first hashtag, #barcamp, began a trend that has changed the way we communicate online.
Twitter says an average of 125 million hashtags are shared every day. And while the most tweeted hashtag in 2007 was used around 9,000 times, this year’s most-used hashtag was used over 300 million times.
Unsurprisingly, the most tweeted about movie hashtag is #starwars. But The Walking Dead takes out the prize when it comes to TV shows.
To celebrate this milestone, Twitter is launching their own celebration for 2:00PM AEST. Use the hashtag #hashtag10 in your tweets and this will launch a special custom emoji that will run for 24 hours.
Do you use hashtags outside social media? Do you know someone that actually prefaces what they’re about to say with “hashtag”?
Comments
2 responses to “The #Hashtag Just Turned Ten Years Old”
That’s embarrassing.
But a pound is £
# is hash.
“Created by tech evangelist Chris Messina, he saw it as a way to create groups on the individually-focussed Twitter platform”
Which is what IRC was doing 20 years earlier.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2811#section-2.1
Why are people tweeting about the hashtag?