CHRIS: I guess the best way to describe me is sort of just a man of the internet. I'm sort of best known for having invented the hashtag. Although that was 15-16 years ago, it's sort of, one, defined a bit of my career trajectory. And it's a story that I think is very helpful and useful for people who are coming up in the internet, as well as to sort of understand where we are.


JAMES: Welcome to Happy Paths, where we unpack the human stories behind some of the most used, most influential, and most famous software from the internet era. I'm James Evans. I’m the CEO of CommandBar, and the host of Happy Paths.


What do TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have in common? It's the hashtag invented by a man of the internet, Chris Messina, who you just heard from earlier. Throughout his career, Chris has worked on movements online and offline that have helped define social media and social technology broadly. If you've used Firefox, attended a BarCamp event, or even checked in at a co-working space, then you're more than familiar with Chris' widespread impact. 


I recently sat down with Chris to learn more about the hashtag and to see how a simple feature proposed via a tweet evolved social media basically everywhere on the internet. 2007 was a huge year in tech, but it was also very early for what we'd call the social web today.


CHRIS: Up until that point, computers and technology was largely the domain of academia and professional work. And the idea of using technology for social purposes to connect with friends and family, you know, outside of email, was still a relatively novel idea.


JAMES: I was in middle school and barely technologically conscious at the time. But I do remember the product demo that shook the world in 2007: when Apple introduced the iPhone.


[iPhone Keynote 2007 Clip]


STEVE JOBS: This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. [applause] Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.


CHRIS: Many of us had been going to tech events. And specifically, the one that was relevant back then was South by Southwest, as well as a series of events that I had co-organized called BarCamps. This was sort of how the tech community in Silicon Valley and beyond were organizing themselves and getting together. 


And we were looking for ways to use, you know, these same technology tools to facilitate those types of connections and interactions. You know, we were still learning the basics of how to use these tools for social purposes. And so that's kind of the primordial ooze with which the hashtag sort of [laughs] came from.


JAMES: This was also the time of Web 2.0, which saw the rise of a lot of technology that we know as standard stuff today, like social networking, rich user interfaces, as well as location-based features. And the lineage of some services and SaaS products that we use now traces back to this period of time. Products would emerge, get popular quickly, influence other products, and then fade away. One of these early social apps was called Dodgeball.


[Dodgeball, the Movie, Clip]


PATCHES O'HOULIHAN: If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.


JUSTIN: What? 


JAMES: Sorry, couldn't resist. 


CHRIS: Dodgeball begot Foursquare, begot Swarm. And Dodgeball had been sold to Google and became the foundation for something called Google Latitude. Google Latitude was a way for tracking your location, which is now essentially your location history. So a lot of these features, you know, have their origins back with individual apps or products that were acquired and then ingested into larger organizations. 


We were also using Flickr. Flickr was our version of Instagram, essentially. And it was a web-based platform for uploading and sharing your photos. You know, you can sort of think about it as Google Photos today. We used software called Wikis, which people are familiar with Notion today. 


When we organized the first BarCamp in 2005, it was a Wiki that was world-writable. Literally, anybody could come and edit the page, just like Wikipedia. And there was, like, no content moderators, or staff, or anybody like that. It was just kind of, like, there just wasn't that many people, you know, around vandalizing things.


JAMES: So there was this Cambrian explosion of social tools at the time. But you could already see some standing out and growing faster than others, and Twitter was certainly one of those. Twitter, in 2007, was not like Twitter is today. Actually, it was kind of empty and a bit, let's say, quotidian. You can see this if you scroll back in someone's feed far enough to 2007-2008. 


People tweeted about their day, or what they ate for lunch, or what they were watching on TV at the time. It was also exclusive. You had to be invited by someone who was already a user. Twitter really caught on during South by Southwest, which Chris mentioned earlier. Soon, people were finding a greater use for those random tweets. They were finding a way to connect with others.


CHRIS: It was a way, essentially, for me to keep my friends kind of ambiently aware of what I was up to or what I was doing. And it's kind of low commitment. Like, I don't really care who kind of sees or knows this, but it's a way for me to kind of put optionality, like, create sort of social liquidity, I guess, for things happening. So I'll give you an example. We started the first co-working spaces in San Francisco, which then, of course, became like the global community. 


And if someone was in town, let's say, and they were looking for a place to work, they could tweet about the fact that, you know, hey, I'm coming in from Berlin or something. Anybody got a desk for me to use? And it'd be like, hey, cool, like, come on by. And so there was this undirectedness about Twitter where, unlike email, where you have to know who you're posting your message to, Twitter kind of allowed you to be ambiguous. 


And then, for anybody who was on that early network, which, again, was a relatively small number of people, they could then see that message and then respond and then connect. You know, like with anything else, people became better at optimizing their communication. And they realized that this was a very inexpensive way to kind of advertise whatever they were doing. But in the early days, it was kind of sending text messages out and getting text messages back and connecting in those ways.


JAMES: I really like the social restaurant analogy of Twitter. Think about it like this: Twitter is like sitting in a restaurant and overhearing a conversation at a nearby table and then just joining in. Because this was the early days of Twitter, you were primarily just talking with your own social circle, which probably mirrored your offline graph more than it might today. It's like eavesdropping, but not in a rude or intrusive way.


CHRIS: You know, I have this big tree out of the back of my house now with, like, all these birds. And they're constantly just chirping all the time, and it is so similar. And the product is just so well-named. Because, like, these birds could give a shit about anybody overhearing them, like, they're just going to talk, and talk, and talk. People are so much the same way because we are a social species. 


[Birds chirping]


I wrote the blog post proposing the hashtag in August of 2007. But the blog post right before that was a blog post that was called Whispering Tweets. And the concept was to kind of actually address this issue with the behavior where I proposed this idea of starting your tweet with an exclamation point, like, bang! And the idea was that if you started your tweet with that character, then it wouldn't actually get sent out as an SMS to all your followers. And so that was what preceded the hashtag. 


So you can kind of see, again, this primordial ooze, like, different patterns and different experiments trying to emerge to give us a chance to have a little bit more control and intention in how we shared information and who got to see it. And so, you know, the first idea didn't really take off, didn't really work. But the idea that followed immediately, obviously, had a lot more legs and did take off.


JAMES: Chris' initial bang may have gone out with a whimper. Sorry again. But, as you can see, that spark was the catalyst for the hashtag that we know and use today. Chris had this clever idea to allow users to self-label their content with a hashtag. The event that provided the activation energy for the hashtag to take off was an event he actually co-organized called BarCamp.


CHRIS: In 2005, we organized BarCamp, and that was an event that was self-organized. And so the attendees came, and they essentially put on the event. So all you had to do was kind of, like, put up a flag and say, "We're doing this event." People would show up, and then the event would kind of happen. There was a little bit more facilitation to it, but you get the idea. 


Twitter then came out in 2006. And it was like, wow, this is amazing. You know, they're starting to be these decentralized grassroots BarCamps that are happening all over the world. It'd be really cool if we could eavesdrop on those events as they're happening. And we need a way to kind of corral those messages. Well, how do we do that? 


Well, at the time, as I mentioned, there were several other pieces of software that we were using. We were using Flickr, and Flickr had the concept of groups, you know, just like a mailing list. And you could join a group, and then you could post your photos of whatever that were topical to that interest group. In IRC, you had channels, and each channel had a topic that was set. And so that was another model that you could use. 


In fact, there was another service at the time called Jaiku, which my friend Jyri Engeström had built that kind of had the concept of hashtags but in a stricter implementation. Now, the problem was that you could only use a prefix to do that targeting, and so that seemed too restrictive for me. Because what if I had a message that I wanted to send to multiple groups? And, on Twitter, you only had 140 characters. So you had to have something that was extremely efficient in order to work with SMS. 


And if let's say that I was talking about being at South by Southwest, and it was awesome, now I've just used nine characters, one for the tag, and then one for the word. And so now I'm running out of characters. So if you could duplicate or rather, I guess, reduce to one the token or the tag that you're using to identify your content, suddenly, now you've made something that works for the medium. It's hyper-efficient. It's easy. And it's viral in the sense that anybody that would see a hashtag could gradually learn to imitate or emulate that behavior and also adopt the tags that are trending or being used by, you know, sort of a social group.


JAMES: So there's lots to unpack here. But one thing stands out for me, the fact that he didn't work for Twitter. He was just a user of the platform who thought, hey, this could be a great way for users to self-categorize content. Admittedly, Chris is a more engaged user than most people, but I think it showcases a feature of the internet that was more present in the early days of social than it is today, where most users are passive consumers of the products they use.


In B2B, this has changed a bit over the past few years. In particular, there are tools, one popular one is called Canny, that let companies solicit feedback from their end users and engage in conversations over what they should build next. But, in general, software today is used the same way things like cereal and cars are, with a clear separation between the makers and the users. Anyway, back to Twitter. Just because Chris didn't work at Twitter didn't mean Twitter wasn't noticing.


CHRIS: They kind of had no time for me because, as you said, I was just a generic user. So the people that I connected better with were the engineers and developers who were building these things. And so I was able to have conversations with them about what they were doing, or what they were building, and just kind of my excitement about the platform. And that, I think, was one of the ways in which I, you know, kind of found a side door. 


And it was the case where the early users were so enthusiastic, like, where product-market fit really existed in the sense that product was being pulled out of the company. Twitter, the company, and the founders were very opposed to the hashtag because they thought it was ugly. Fair point. But they wanted it to, I think, be a lot more like, you know, Blogger in this pristine space. And, you know, to be kind of of the intelligentsia, you know, and the sort of hoi polloi. 


And I was, you know, just a stupid user. I didn't have a lot of money or anything. And it was scrappy. And I was trying to solve a problem for me that I had immediately, which was coordinating and organizing these messages for these events and co-working spaces that were getting started.


JAMES: That's right. At first, Twitter was anti-hashtag, which is pretty wild when you think about how much it's been used by the company for advertising in the past five years or so. Another thing I find interesting about this story is that it highlights the tension between, on the one hand, companies that build blindly towards a vision without incorporating any user feedback and, on the other, companies that are too focused on incorporating user feedback, such that they lack coherent product direction. It's very easy to end up in the latter camp and turn your company into a feature factory, churning out things users have asked for without any real thought to the holistic product experience. 


The adage you'll often hear in books like The Mom Test is to focus on understanding customer pain instead of soliciting solutions from customers. That said, it doesn't mean you should ignore customer solutions, especially for a social product where you're making a bet on emergent behavior. Chris says it better.


CHRIS: A good product is the result of a healthy conversation that's going on between people who are building things and people who are using things. And so products and product releases, just like you have, you know, versions in software, are kind of milestones along the journey to understand how best to solve a problem.


So I think it's just a really interesting thing to kind of consider the fact that Biz, in particular, would be so dismissive of the idea that would eventually kind of take off and find success across all platforms. It just provides me kind of like that humbling sense, even for myself, that whenever I think I've figured something out, it's always good to sort of have an open mind to other directions or thoughts about something.


JAMES: Here is Biz Stone talking about Twitter in 2009.


"When you're talking about a tool, when you're talking about historically, like, whether it's social, whether it's business, whether it's scientific, or whatever, getting information somewhere quickly is one of the most valuable things you can do on the planet. Like, that's where a lot of the value of Twitter comes in. And it's that real-time nature of it."


In a 10th anniversary post about the hashtag, Biz wrote about how Chris literally walked into the early Twitter office and made an official pitch. Here's a quote from that post. "His proposal was simple, useful, and fun—just like Twitter. It was an undeniable, elegant proposal, but I really needed to get back to work. I turned back to my computer screen to help get Twitter back up and running, hurriedly ending the conversation with a sarcastic, 'Sure, we’ll get right on that.'" Luckily, that didn't stop Chris.


CHRIS: I guess I kind of always had this, like, willingness and ability to just be by myself and do my own thing and not really worry that much about what other people thought. And so, in a similar way, what was happening with the hashtag in 2007 was, like, I had to kind of spearhead the effort, talk about it, write about it. And then, in October of that year, my friend Nate Ritter was down in San Diego. And, you know, as we have wildfires in California now, we had wildfires back then. But this was the first time where social media kind of existed as wildfires were going on. 


And so, Nate Ritter realized that he could use Twitter to disseminate information about these wildfires to his community. Because he was listening to the radio, and to the police scanner, and to the news, and, essentially, using SMS because SMS actually was reliable during those fires, as opposed to the internet, and used it to kind of help keep his community safe. 


[Wildfires Interview Clip] 


Man 1: The winds were severe. Ash and embers were everywhere.


Man 2: Well, what we're going to do is to protect and keep the house from catching fire and just do the extraordinary.


Man 3: [inaudible 14:19]


CHRIS: And so, when I saw that he was doing this, it occurred to me that this would be an amazing use of the hashtag. I mean, it's one thing to use it for an event that's happening in real-time. But now this was a case where, one, you needed to spread information very quickly. And then there was also going to be people kind of on the edge in a decentralized fashion that could help propagate more information or add more information to the mix. 


And so that's where the transparency and open-source aspect of the hashtag being something that once you see it, you can kind of adopt it, even though you don't quite know what it is, allowed other people to then adopt and change their communication to be similar to Nate's style. And then Wired actually wrote about this phenomenon and kind of gave some credibility to this concept and this idea of using social media for citizen journalism, amplified by the use of something like the hashtag.


JAMES: So the hashtag started to be used in very different ways, which is a classic signal of product-market fit. The way many products and patterns get started is by solving a narrow problem for a specific audience. But, even better, is one solution solving a similar problem for many audiences. And that's what we saw with the hashtag, uncorrelated usage in many different circumstances, all because people found it useful to attach their message to a larger topic or meme. 


Hashtags are such an integral feature for so many platforms that it's a little hard to believe that the idea came from one person. But turns out Twitter was more of a mishmash of individual creativity than you might expect for an app with such reach. When I think of Facebook today, I think of massive teams running tons of experiments to see if they could tweak engagement by a few basis points. But the early days of Twitter and the hashtag evolved more organically.


CHRIS: So much of Twitter, actually, is an amalgamation of things that the community built and then either Twitter acquired, or acqui-hired, or whatever else. For example, the iOS app originally started out as something called Tweetie and was acquired and then released in the App Store as Twitter's actual app. As Twitter acquired some of those products, the hashtag had already been added by those third-party developers. So Twitter really couldn't remove the functionality. And it was also relatively simple and somewhat benign. So they just kind of left it around. 


As I saw other people start to use it, it started to become clear that anything else that could have been tried probably would not work. In the beginning, my advocacy of the hashtag really kind of just related to my community and to developers and people building these kinds of apps for Twitter. It was actually The Tea Party and the financial crisis that led to the hashtag gaining purchase in groups outside of the kind of nerdy, tech world. 


So it was politics and the use of Twitter that drove the early use of the hashtag in groups that were beyond me, like, the first time really where I saw people using this that had nothing to do with me, that didn't know me, where it was totally organic. And it wasn't until Instagram launched in 2010 that I think the hashtag really became much more of a cultural phenomenon.


JAMES: I remember, early on, the hashtag was a cool, young person thing, but it quickly became a mainstream cultural phenomenon. 


[Playing #SELFIE by ChainSmokers]


♪ But first, let me take a selfie. ♪ 


JAMES: I think this goes back to something Chris said about distribution. The hashtag is so visually striking when you see it. It doesn't look like ordinary writing. So people are going to remember it and have opinions about it.


CHRIS: In order to get people to label their photos so that you could search, the obvious solution was the hashtag because it was already being used on Twitter. And back then, you could also cross-post from Instagram to Twitter to keep your Twitter followers up to date about your Instagram goings-on. And so the hashtag would travel with a photo from one network to another. 


So that was kind of, I think, the moment that really, you know because Instagram is such a visual platform and visual imagery is so much more accessible, that, I think, was the inflection point for the hashtag where it really became something of a cultural phenomenon.


JAMES: Today, pretty much every social media app you can think of supports the hashtag natively. Many apps have custom interfaces for selecting them and also make it easy to filter for content that contains them. Twitter, for example, autocompletes popular hashtags and also uses hashtags to generate trending content that shows up on the right of the desktop app, whether that content is breaking news, conferences, events, or memes. Some people use it all the time; some people find it cringy. But it's still here, and no one has come up with an alternative solution to the self-categorization problem that has any staying power.


CHRIS: You know, like, in some ways, just as much as seeing other people use your product in kind of new and unknown ways gives you a sense for product-market fit, I think the degree to which there is disagreement about the proper use of something like the hashtag also is an indicator. You know, there are a lot of people who hate the hashtag. Like, [laughs] they think it's stupid. It's, like, you know, ugly, and people use it for spam. And, fine. 


But there was the asterisk, and there was the number sign on the Nokia keypad. That's why it's the hashtag. Also, it was used in IRC. Like, one of the reasons why I went with that was because it was being used elsewhere. So it was somewhat defensible because, you know, you could choose any random character on the keyboard, but it happened to be one that was available. It wasn't widely used. Anyways, whether you like it or not, it is the symbol that now precedes these words or phrases, and that is the hashtag.


[Clip from "#Hashtag" with Jimmy Fallon & Justin Timberlake (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon)]


JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: #werunthis


JIMMY FALLON: #trueplayersforlife


JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: #isitworthitorletmeworkit


JIMMY FALLON: #iputmythingdownflipitandreverseit


BOTH: Hashtag. [vocalization] Hashtag. [vocalization] Hashtag.


JAMES: As we wrap up, I ask Chris what it means for him to be the inventor of the hashtag. In other words, how does the invention shape his personal life? There are very few people who've invented something that is used daily by so many people. And I was very curious to know whether his day-to-day is still colored positively or negatively by his invention.


CHRIS: My relevance and significance is somewhat only subject to the popularity that these other platforms obtained in the last 15 years. You know, we've been on this crazy journey of seeing how social media as a distribution platform for content and ideas and anything really has changed and shaped the way that we communicate. You know, it's not so much deterministic where there are some, you know, lawyers or academics someplace that lay out the rules of communication, and, you know, anything else results in jailing. 


I mean, you could have a civilization or a society that, you know, says this is the way to speak, and it's all Latin or death. But language, instead, is plastic, just like our minds. We have neuroplasticity. So, in that way, the hashtag has kind of evolved over time. Like, originally, it was just, you know, I kind of thought maybe using one or two tags per tweet was fine. People realized that this was a way of gaining visibility and traction because of search and because of the trending topics, and so they exploited that. They found arbitrage in it. Then the systems had to adapt and evolve to how language was being manipulated for commercial purposes. 


The only reason why I outed myself and kind of took on the mantle of the inventor of the hashtag was because Twitter, at the time, 2011, maybe, realized that Instagram was able to monetize the hashtag. And so Twitter attempted to trademark the hashtags so that no one else could use it. And, of course, after having rejected it, I wasn't going to, you know, sit around and let that happen. So I had some angry emails at the time and said, "Hell no, [laughs], like, that's not happening," pretty much. 


There's another layer of interpretation and meaning that the hashtag kind of allows for that typical language kind of doesn't. And it also allows for group connectivity across mediums and across platforms that no other kind of text convention affords. When I started to see billboards, or bus signs, or placards out in the real world, you know, where you can't obviously click on a hashtag or something, [laughs], you know, and yet, they started to replace URLs. 


So the hashtag actually is like a URL, except it kind of allows for spaces to exist for those communities on each platform where people happen to find themselves. I think, in my case, I was very clear from the beginning that I wanted the hashtag to be something that anybody on the internet could use for free without coordinating or getting permission from myself. And that was in contrast to a lot of the things and structures that I saw in the world, you know, whether it was magazines, or newspapers, or anything like that, that kind of went through sort of an editorial committee. 


There are obviously some negatives out of the hashtag, but also, you know, quite a bit of, I think, positives that have really impacted the world. So I still think that it has a lot of value and purpose. I know a lot of people kind of moved away from it. But if you find a way that works for yourself and you do so in a way that is genuine, I think there's a lot of benefit to it. It's a lot less just about me, and more about the values of the community that I was part of that helped to bring this thing into reality.


JAMES: That was Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag. To wrap up, I think this story is so interesting because it's two stories at once. On the one hand, it's a story about how a social media trend that a single person came up with spread virally to the point where its DNA was incorporated into the DNA of its host, the social media platforms, so irreversibly that it's still around and useful today. 


But, of course, it's also changed with the times and morphed from just a tool to attract other people to your content to a way to influence the algorithm as well. On the other hand, it's also a microcosm of the early social internet, one where users thought critically about the future of the platforms they used and even participated in their development. That spirit is rare today, but I think just as relevant as we consider which platforms we want to dominate the next era of social. 


One thing about that future, though, is clear: When we're browsing the platform we're all using in five years, whether that's Twitter, Mastodon, or TikTok, we'll probably see a lot of hashtags there. 


Thank you for listening to Happy Paths. For more information about the show, visit us at commandbar.com/happypaths. Or, you can send us a Tweet at @CommandBar. 


This podcast is executive produced by Maurice Cherry, with engineering and editing from Mandy Moore. Special thanks to Chris Messina and, of course, the entire team at Command Bar. I'm James Evans, and this is Happy Paths. See you next time.