Happy birthday #... you are 10 today

The venerable hashtag on Twitter is celebrating its 10th birthday. But the strange thing is Twitter didn't even create this hashtag. Now the hashtag is so popular that it is not only used on Twitter but also on Facebook and Instagram it is used in everyday conversations.

Hashtags were first invented as a Twitter tech tool by Chris Messina, who didn't even work for Twitter.

Messina was a Google engineer who thought appending the pointy prefix to a word at the end of your messages would be a handy way of separating messages into easily searchable terms for groups, themes or topics. He was inspired from Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, a service techies often used to facilitate online communities. The first campaign started in 2007 and now it has been used widely around the world.

On August 23, 2007, social technology professional Chris Messina posted this tweet: "How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups...?" According to reports, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams found the hashtag to be too "nerdy" to catch on and become mainstream.

A similar concept, channels, had existed on chatrooms of the day, but he was the first to consider it.

Two years later, hashtags had become so popular that Twitter arranged a formal adoption, and the rest, shall we say, is hashtag history.

OneIndia News