Chris Messina invented the hashtag and pitched it to Twitter's founders, who were skeptical. He saw it as a tool for culture change through three stages: adoption, behavior change, and finally shifting how people think. Messina believed in open platforms where anyone could participate without permission.
Chapters
The co-founders of Twitter were a little bit blinded by their previous success. They had built this blogging platform called Blogger, and they had sold it to Google. And so they were thinking, okay, we're going to solve this problem of relevancy on Twitter simply by creating an algorithm for doing search. But I wasn't interested in that kind of success. I was interested in a different kind of success. They had their kind of success where they maybe wanted to sell their company or make another big company. I wanted to do something different that was more diffuse and more for the web as a platform. Hey, so I'm Chris Messina. Today I'm talking about the unlikely lesson from inventing the hashtag. I'm here with a bunch of students from Draper University. If you want to find out more, you can go to draperuniversity.com. So how was I defining success for this idea? Well, to me, I mean, partially it was about adoption. It was about getting people to use this idea, right? I mean, if you imagine that back then, if I were to tweet using a hashtag, that word would not look any different than anything else. It wasn't linked to anything. It didn't perform a search. It was just a stupid-looking word. People were confused about what I was doing. And so I had to slowly convince people that this idea was a good idea. It also required that people change their behavior without any real obvious benefit. So if I asked you today to start putting exclamation points in front of your words, you'd be like, why would I do that? Right? Well, at some point somebody decided to put things like currency symbols in front of numbers to indicate that they were about money, and they convinced people to do that. So somehow language adopts— adapts and changes to emerging needs. And then overall, what I was really trying to do was to think about how we could change culture to make it both more participatory and more inclusive, so that more voices could be involved without having to get permission from anybody to contribute to the commons of social media. Now, one way that I like to think about this is through an analogy. I'm a very visual person, and so I tend to use visual metaphors to describe things. And I like to think about this one in terms of pucks. and stones. How many of you guys recognize the thing on the— that's the left? How many of you are Canadians? Yes, you lived in Canada? Okay, exactly, okay. So for those of you who don't know, you're about to find out, your mind's gonna be blown. So in a lot of business schools, this quote gets used a lot from this Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky, to skate to where the puck's going rather than where it's been. Sort of makes sense, right? The problem with that idea essentially is that that's where everyone else is also going. So it's not that innovative to be like, oh, let's go do like the next big thing, because of course everyone else is trying to figure out what the next big thing is. Instead, I've become a lot more interested in this other metaphor for something called curling. So that stone is from a sport called curling, which may not be specifically Canadian but seems to be related to Canadians. Essentially, I'll show you what this looks like. I know, it's thrilling, right? There you go. That's the whole game. It's like bocce ball. It's amazing. There's an Olympic sport dedicated to it. To make this a little more clear, okay, now I was— I gave this similar presentation recently, and people told me what all these different components of the sports are, but I've forgotten the labels, so we'll just like make some stuff up. But essentially you have like a court-like thing here, right? And you have a bullseye, so you're trying to get your stone into the bullseye, and you have these people who are sweepers, who are sort of sweeping in front of the thing to get it to go where you want it to go. You wanna have just enough friction so the thing slows down just in the right amount of time, but not too slick so that it goes past the bullseye, right? That's culture change, that's what I was trying to do, right? So to make this very clear to you, right, so this is sort of me preferably, like I'm the guy who like, I don't know what the launcher dude's name is, but like he launches the stone, and then you have like the sweepers who are like out in front who are like sweeping the thing, and then that's the hashtag, right? So I'm trying to get the hashtag into like the cultural change bullseye, and then time of course is like, you know, over a sequence of time, so that might be me in like 2007, and then like, you know, maybe the line is like 2009, and then we get, you know, here to 2011, et cetera. And of course you got like the haters, right, who are like, no, this is stupid. This is like the dumbest idea I've ever heard. And I got quite a lot of that all along the way. And yet once you get into that bullseye, you're starting to see adoption. You're starting to see that uptick. You're starting to see some success. And then once you get into the closer circle, you're getting to behavior change. And then if you actually hit the bullseye, that's culture change. And for me, that's what success looked like. That's what I was trying to do. Thank you. So in order to support that, I wrote this 2,000-word blog post where I essentially described what I was trying to do and what my solution looked like. So this was written or published 2 days after I tweeted this out. And in it, I actually made a bunch of mockups. So I went into Photoshop. I'm pretty sure I was using Photoshop back then. This is what Twitter used to look like. It's not that different. And I made some changes to the homepage. Specifically, I created this whole section Where I had what were called channel tags, or what you might think of today as trending topics. So I was like, what if Twitter had this idea of kind of like this set of tags that are being used across the network? That would be an amazing way to track what's going on. So after I wrote that blog post, I went down to South Park in San Francisco. I went into Twitter's headquarters. This is inside of Twitter's headquarters. That's Biz Stone, one of the co-founders. That's Jack Dorsey, now CEO. I'm of course holding Wired like a noob, you know, where they had just been interviewed and featured, right? And I'm taking this stupid photo like a geek. And this is also Tony. And essentially I pitched them the idea. I was like, guys, I think I solved the problem for groups on Twitter. I think I can make Twitter more useful for a lot more people. And Biz was like, that's the nerdiest idea I've ever heard. It's never gonna work. I was like, okay, I see. All right, well, that's fine. You know, meanwhile he had to go back to like the servers that were on fire, et cetera. So I understand. But the other thing I think that I took away from this experience was that the co-founders of Twitter were a little bit blinded by their previous success. They had built this blogging platform called Blogger, and they had sold it to Google. And of course, having worked at Google, I know that everything at Google is seen as information. It's like literally working for, hmm, I don't know who the ones are that control Agent Smith in The Matrix, but they sort of see everything as information, as dots, ones and zeros, just to be sort of like, for an algorithm to be created to optimize. And so they were thinking, okay, we're gonna solve this problem of relevancy on Twitter simply by creating an algorithm for doing search. But I wasn't interested in that kind of success. I was interested in a different kind of success. They had their kind of success where they maybe wanted to sell their company or make another big company. I wanted to do something different that was more diffuse and more for the web as a platform. Yeah, so I mean, it was like super awesome to both get like this like Standing introduction reception. That was great. And like, the students are like super pumped, super excited about what's going on, and really engaged after the talk. And so I thought it was really good to have a chance to like talk to them, share my ideas, and also hear from them in terms of things that they're thinking about. So it was a real honor to come to Draper.
