ViralWorld

The hashtag

You might remember it as pound sign channel tag, Chris Messina hashtag proposal

“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
A possible copy is known, but ViralWorld has not verified that it is the right one.

2007·Early YouTube·informative

One tweet in 2007 proposed a punctuation mark for grouping conversations, and the whole internet adopted it.

At a glanceThe facts

Remembered as
pound sign channel tag
Spread in
2007
Began as
A social-media post
Format
Phenomenon
Era
Early YouTube
Made by
Proposed for Twitter by Chris Messina
What it said
“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
Where it started
Twitter; the sign had labelled channels on IRC since about 1988
Origin
Not an upload originally
Available
Not held by ViralWorld

What this wasThe story

On 23 August 2007 Chris Messina, a product consultant in San Francisco, tweeted a suggestion: use the pound sign to group messages by topic, the way IRC used it for channels. Twitter did not build it. People simply started typing it, and the platform eventually made the strings clickable because users had already made them meaningful.

The hashtag spread to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and eventually television captions and shop windows. It entered the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014. It also became the standard mechanism for organising political movements online, which is a weight nobody was proposing for it in 2007.

Why it matteredWhat changed

One user’s suggestion, not taken up by the company for two years, became the way every platform groups what people are talking about.

TimelineIn order

  1. Made

    IRC networks adopt the sign to label groups and topics.1

  2. Took off

    The tags spread in tweets about forest fires in San Diego.1

  3. Made

    Chris Messina proposes it in a tweet.1

  4. Later

    Stowe Boyd publishes the words “hash tag” in a blog post.1

  5. Picked up

    Twitter begins turning hashtags into links to search results.1

  6. Mainstream

    The Oxford English Dictionary adds the word.1

What people misrememberSet straight

Commonly remembered asTwitter invented the hashtag.

ActuallyA user proposed it and other users took it up. Twitter adopted it in 2009.1

What it createdWhat came out of it

Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later

This first circulated as a social-media post, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.

Where it came fromWhat we know

There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. What it began as is recorded here, and what is shown is a later copy.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This first circulated as a social-media post, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

When
The sources below date the original to 2007-08-23. ViralWorld records this as a cited claim rather than an established publication date, because it holds no copy to check it against.
Where
Known on X.

More from 2007You were there

SourcesWhat was read

  1. Wikipedia — Hashtag

Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things

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