It was August 23, 2007 when US lawyer Chris Messina first used the "#" symbol, creating a real fad
The word hashtag has now become commonly used. Everyone knows the meaning (and use), but few know the true history of hashtags. The now famous symbol "#" appeared for the first time on a social platform precisely ten years ago: August 23, 2007.
It was used by a San Francisco lawyer, Chris Messina, who decided to use the hashtag followed by a word in one of his Tweets. It is from the platform created by Jack Dorsey that the hashtag craze was born and slowly spread to all other social networks. In 2009 it was Instagram to adopt them, while Facebook waited until 2013. Now everyone uses them, young and old, politicians and sportsmen, to categorize their messages and create a following to their message. It's no coincidence that all advertising campaigns are now accompanied by an official hashtag: in this way we try to create a sort of link between the company and the user-customer.
What are hashtags
What does the word hashtag actually mean? Hashtag is a word made up of two words: "hash" which means "hash" in Italian and "tag" which means label. So the hashtag is nothing but a label that categorizes the messages of users. Thanks to hashtags, it is easier for users to find other messages that talk about the same topic and be able to understand what is happening in the world. In the case of dangerous situations, it is possible to use a hashtag to categorize your message and make sure that it reaches as many people as possible.
In reality, Chris Messina's use of hashtags was completely different, but from a simple intuition, one of the phenomena that has changed the way we communicate in recent years was born.
Ten years and counting
Although ten years have passed since the first tweet published with a hashtag, the phenomenon is not affected by the past years. According to some estimates, hashtags are used more than 100 million times only on Twitter and we can't count the number of "erasers" used on Instagram to label their images.
To celebrate the tenth birthday, on Twitter was born the hashtag #Hashtag10, which since the early hours of this morning is in thetrending topic of the microblogging platform. Happy birthday #hashtag!