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I was able to interview Chris Messina, the godfather of the Hashtag, in 2013. Chris was a very early Twitter user that began posting tweets with #’s in order to categorise them in search. This later caught onto Twitter back end and the hashtag generation was born.
Q: Give us a brief summary of how you were the first to start using the Hashtag on Twitter
Basically there were a bunch of people suggesting that Twitter should provide some kind of “groups” feature — similar to Flickr — and I thought that, while the need was reasonable, I really didn’t want all the management overhead of a standard group, especially when I was on my mobile phone. So, I looked to IRC and Jaiku and decided that prepending special words with a # symbol would work pretty well.
I started doing this in my tweets and for quite a while people thought this was nuts or just stupid. But then it caught on — and, well, cat’s outta the bag!
Q: Did Twitter contact you about it’s usage of the hashtag in the service?
Nope. I went to them and said, “Hey, what do you guys think about this? Maybe you could link hashtags to a search on similar or related tweets?” and they were like, “Nah, that’s too nerdy. We’ll use machine learning and figure out what tweets are all about.”
And so I was like, “Ok, I’ll go do this, and you guys do that, and we’ll see where we meet up later.”
Q: When was it that you realised Hashtags would take off on Twitter, Did a celebrity begin using them?
Well, Nate Ritter was probably the first obvious case where someone who was not me used them effectively to share news about the San Diego fire. After that, it was conservative republicans wanting to draw attention to one of their protests. That’s when I knew it was going to be big; if non-geeks were picking up on this idea, it was out of my hands!
Q: Did Twitter approach you about a job at their company after your hashtag introduction?
No. Never. At least not related to the hashtag.
Q: What are your thoughts on Facebook’s introduction of Hashtags?
It’s smart. Every [social] network needs to be responsive to user behavior. People have gone nuts with hashtags. It’s a natural next step for Facebook.
Q: Were you on the team at Google+ who worked on related hashtags?
No. But I consulted with the team that was.
Q: What are current and also near future plans?
Well, hashtags are what they are — people use them in ways I had and hadn’t anticipated. I hope that people continue to use them judiciously and wisely and with their audience in mind, but I also know that people are desperate to connect with others who share the same interest. So — I’m not too worried; the more data that people feed into the system, the better it will be at connecting them with other individuals like them, and that’s the whole point of social networking, right?
