From a convenient way of looking at posts to being a significant component of advertising budgets the world over — the humble hashtag has come a long way on
Twitter. On Wednesday, it turned 10 years old. An average of over 125 million
hashtags
are tweeted each day, according to Twitter.
The hashtag was not a feature Twitter introduced. It was, in fact, users of the service who figured out the sign could be used in this manner. Tweeting a term with a hash sign before it makes it a clickable link. One can “tag” a
tweet
with a term like #Charlottesville or #IPL. This way, not only does the post get categorised under a certain topic, it also becomes searchable. Clicking the tag shows users all the tweets containing the tag, making it easier to follow a discussion. In tech parlance, such public tagging is called “folksonomy”.
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.