5 Facts About The Hashtag That You Didn’t Know

 

1.The hashtag was first used online on August 23, 2007.

Chris Messina first suggested using the hashtag to keep track of conversations on Twitter.

He approached Twitter with the concept at a bad time as they were preoccupied, and sadly the idea was forgotten.

So Messina started to use them regardless to see if he could start a trend.

Finally, Twitter caught on, and this is where the hashtag became what it is today.

Messina’s first-ever hashtag was #barcamp.

2.The hashtag is used to mean number or pounds (lb).

The “hashtag” used to be associated with the “pound” sign in the US.

The Latin for pound weight was “libra pondo,” and in the 14th century, the term became abbreviated to lb.

In the late 1800s, the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter explained in its manual that the “#” symbol could be used for pound weight as there was no lb button.

The manual wrote that if “#” was placed in front of a word, it referred to a number. But if “#” was placed after a word, it referred to pound weight.

This was the beginning of the “#” used to represent weight and numbers.

3.You cannot patent a hashtag.

Some people wonder why Messina didn’t patent the hashtag, as he could be a millionaire.

The answer is he couldn’t. Although he had no interest in doing so, it isn’t possible. You can only patent a design, invention, process, or a machine.

The hashtag concept or hashtags themselves don’t fall into any qualifying categories.

The only way to own a hashtag is to trademark it.

4. A feature called the “hashflag” was introduced in 2010.

Twitter used “hashflags” alongside the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

This was a temporary feature during the World Cup. It stopped once the matches were over.

But due to its success, Twitter reintroduced hashflags in 2014 for the World Cup in Brazil.

The system worked by allowing users to tweet the three-letter country code of the 32 competing countries.

Once this was typed into the hashtag, it would be replaced with the specific country flag.

5. Hashtags are so popular that they appear in our food.

In 2014 Bird’s Eye food created a new deep-fried delight called the “mashtag.”

This was an updated variation of their famous smiley faces that they thought would attract the social media generation.

The crispy potato shapes included the hashtag and various other symbols associated with social media.