A Brief Cultural History of the #Hashtag

Remember that time pre-hashtag? 2007. The first generation of the iPhone was only a few months old. JK Rowling released the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series. Hairspray strutted all over the cinema screens. Hardly anyone knew what a hashtag was. Seven years later, the hashtag was added in the OED and Bird’s Eye foods released ‘Mashtags’, a mashed potato that came in @ and # shapes. What happened in those seven years?

When it all began

Most people attribute the first hashtag to a tweet by Chris Messina in August 2007:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina ✍ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But the hashtag was first adopted by the public as a way of categorising tweets during the San Diego fire in October 2007:

#sandiegofire 300,000 people evacuated in San Diego county now.

— Nate Ritter (@nateritter) October 23, 2007

On July 2nd 2009, Twitter officially embraced hashtags and hyperlinked them to search results. Tumblr was one of the early adopters of hashtags and launched them on August 18th 2009. A few months later during a homepage redesign, Twitter moved Trending Topics to its homepage, formalising hashtags as a conversation driver on Twitter. Hashtags became part of popular culture in TV shows, celebrities’ promotions and mainstream media:

In Spring 2011 Twitter played a role in the civil unrest of the Arab Spring. #Bahrain became one of the most used hashtags of all time. In June 2012 Twitter aired its first TV commercial, highlighting the hashtag. Increasingly Twitter moved towards becoming almost a second screen to TV during ad breaks, and a way of providing personalised live commentaries to shows. Advertisers were quick to catch onto this, and by January 2013 half of Super Bowl commercials included a hashtag.

Instagram adopted hashtags on January 27, 2011, Flickr added hashtags on March 17, 2013 and Facebook finally broke and adopted hashtags on June 12, 2013.

What a journey, from relatively unknown to one of the most widely used markers on the internet. And you really know you've got through to the public consciousness when, well, this happens.