Why Invent the Hashtag | #Hashtag Inventor Chris Messina

But what was important that came out of that event was a need to organize the social media posts that were being generated from that event. In looking at that behavior, in looking at that need, in looking at what my friends were doing, and recognizing the potential for social media to unite us all together, it occurred to me that if we simply labeled our content, we could all find each other and then connect. And so #BarCamp was the first ever hashtag because it was about bringing those people together for that event. 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 wanna find out more, you can go to draperuniversity.com. I am super excited to be here with you guys today. It's been quite a journey for me, I think, to get to a place like this where I can speak to an audience like this. You know, I actually packed up all my stuff, put it in a storage locker in February of this year, and became a digital nomad. San Francisco for 14 years, essentially trying to figure out how Silicon Valley worked, how to drive my own kind of success here. And so again, it's really, really great to be here talking to you guys at what I imagine is the beginning of or continuation of your own journeys. So it's funny, 'cause when I normally meet new people, I don't normally introduce myself as the guy that Invented the hashtag. Invented the hashtag. Right? Like, it's kind of like a way to deflate a conversation. People are confused. They usually don't believe me. They're sort of like, what do you mean? Yeah, hashtag guy, thanks. They're like, yeah, you invented the hashtag. No, the hashtag's always been there, right? I'm like, OK, well, just Google it. And usually their face kind of like scrunches up and they're like, Wait, you actually invented the hashtag? It works best with like a teen audience, you know, who grew up in this world. But I think it's worthwhile and interesting to think about my experience since doing this. You know, 'cause a lot of people are like, okay, well, all right, fine, you invented the hashtag, but how did you actually do that? How do I invent a hashtag? And I'm like, well, That's one way to think about it, but I've learned, one thing that I've learned is that the more interesting question is actually why, why I invented the hashtag, not so much how. And then of course, what have I learned since then? What have I learned by being connected to this thing now that by any definition is some kind of success? One way to measure that success is to consider that there are over 200 million hashtags that are used per day. That's per day, 200 million times people are typing little pound symbols into their tweets and into their Facebook posts and their Instagram accounts. That's a lot of hashtags. Which equates to 2,300 hashtags per second, right? So in the time that I've been speaking to you, I can't even count the number of hashtags that have been used. But that's an enormous amount of behavior to influence. And to look back on why and how this happened, I think is super relevant and interesting. And by the way, this stat is just on Twitter. This doesn't count all the rest of social media. So I also come to you now in 2019. And we're in the midst of a huge cultural shift, both a cultural shift and a technological shift. And the pace of technology change seems to only be increasing. And it is, of course, thanks to folks like you in the room. And I am— and appreciate the pledge that you guys made because I think a lot of the things that are in there are actually deeply meaningful. And you may say those things and not have or yet know why those things are meaningful, but over time you'll come to realize how important it is. To develop relationships, and to care about the principles that go into why you do things. I also think that it's interesting to think about where we're going from here, right? So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is a bit of the past, and about how this idea came into being, and how it took off on social media, but it also has some lessons about the future. And of course, what I want to offer you with and leave you with is this unlikely lesson, especially in a place like this. Especially when you guys are talking about blockchain and Bitcoin and stuff like that later on today. I think hopefully what I talk about will resonate more deeply than just what Silicon Valley often seems to be in the pursuit of. And that requires us to first start by understanding and thinking about what success means. Personally what it means to us individually, and then what success means to us culturally. I'm also gonna talk about wealth. Like I said, you guys are gonna be talking about Bitcoin, blockchain, things that have to do with money. But before I get into that, I just want to leave that as a note that I'm going to return to later. Now, I should hope that for this audience, this next section should be very obvious. How many of you guys think you know what a hashtag is? Really, like 3 of you? Okay, well, this is amazing. This is great. I have you guys— you guys have like a cell phone, right? Are you guys on the internet? Have you heard of this thing? It's like sweeping the world. It's like television, but interactive. Okay, we're gonna start with what a hashtag is. I'm surprised that very few of you knew about that. Where's your gusto, huh? Okay, so this is a hash, or a pound symbol, or in technical terms, an octothorpe. You can look it up, it's a real term. And usually it is followed by a word or phrase. There you go. Anybody asks you what is a hashtag, you can tell them this is the technical definition from the inventor of the hashtag. This is what a hashtag is, okay? Don't screw this up, okay? So for example, this is a hashtag. Now you'll note something that's important about this is that this is not one simple word. This is a series of words that are actually concatenated or squished together to form a tag, okay? Another hashtag, if you guys have used this one, you guys could. There's a bunch of posts related to it. The other one didn't have anything, so that's why I added this one in. These are obviously examples of hashtags. So now you know what a hashtag is. What is it for? Well, to understand the sort of origin of the hashtag, we have to go back to this event that me and some friends co-organized back in 2005. So it's a little while ago, but this event was called BarCamp. How many of you guys have ever heard of a BarCamp? No, okay, amazing. I'm gonna educate all of you guys on so many things. Okay, so this is me in 2005, okay, standing and organizing and putting on this event. That's awesome. And what this event was was essentially something that's called an unconference. And an unconference is an event where the participants show up and everybody who's there determines the content of the event. So essentially there's no formal set agenda. There's essentially a grid of times and rooms and the people who are there decide what they wanna talk about. That's it. Now as I was looking at this photo, I thought this was pretty funny. You can see things have changed a little bit if you take a look at this camcorder that's down there on the side. Obviously we don't really use those things anymore. I have no idea where the tape would be, but this dates kind of where this was. My pants also fit a little bit better, but that's besides the point. This is the grid that I was talking about. So essentially again, participants would put up the schedule on a grid like this. And this was actually held not far from here in Palo Alto at what used to be Socialtext's headquarters. So this is an event that 6 of my friends planned. I'm sorry. 7 friends in 6 days. And we thought that we would have maybe, you know, 25 near and dear close friends, but instead we had 300 people show up. And we organized this entire event using online social tools, like very early-stage social tools, from wikis to internet chat to a bunch of stuff before there was Facebook. I mean, Facebook was at universities, but it wasn't public yet. Before there was Twitter. And there were a bunch of tech companies that actually launched at this event. One of them was called TechCrunch, which you guys may, may have heard of. Another called Pandora, which is the music service. As well as a browser company that I was working on at the time called Flock. Since that initial BarCamp in 2005, we open sourced the model and we invited other people to take that idea and create their own. And since then there's been thousands upon thousands of these events all around the world. in over 350 cities. And in fact, the largest BarCamp that ever occurred had 6,400 people in Myanmar. And so you can see how this little idea, this little seed of an idea spread simply by giving it away. But what was important that came out of that event and that sort of pushed this forward later was a need to organize the social media posts that were being generated from that event. And so, you know, in looking at that behavior and looking at that need and looking at what my friends were doing and recognizing the potential for social media to unite us all together, it occurred to me that if we simply labeled our content using something like a tag like this, we could all find each other and then connect. And so #BarCamp was the first ever hashtag because it was about bringing those people together for that event. So a quick chronology for you. The first BarCamp was held on August 23rd, 2005. Twitter launched next spring in March 2006. I joined Twitter in July, so I was a late adopter, in 2006. And I was the 1,186th user on Twitter. No, I never worked at Twitter, even though this is a very common question. They're like, oh, you created the hashtag, you must have worked at Twitter. Nope, never worked at Twitter, never got paid by Twitter. I was just an independent user of the web. 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.