#What #How #CanYou #ShouldYou
“[Twitter] told me flat out, ‘These things are for nerds. They’re never going to catch on.’”
– Chris Messina on Twitter’s rejection to his idea of hashtag.
#WhatIsAHashTag
In 2007, Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, first suggested in a tweet, that Twitter users utilise the hash symbol to create group topics. The hashtag – born on 25 August 2007 – did catch on and was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, defined as “n. (on social media web sites and applications) a word or phrase preceded by a hash and used to identify messages relating to a specific topic; (also) the hash symbol itself, when used in this way.” A hashtag is also a type of label or metadata (data that provides information about other data).