daily knowledge: HAPPY 16TH BIRTHDAY TO THE #HASHTAG!!!!!!
on august 23rd, chris messina walked into the twitter offices (you were able to just Do That at the time) and proposed the idea of using the pound sign (#) to group together tweets using the word next to the pound sign. the engineering team gave him his 5 minutes, basically said "oh yeah ok sounds neat" and chris went on his way.
it looked like that would be the end of it, but later that day, chris tweeted the following: ![how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/462780349815062539/1144093472450678844/image.png "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?")
he went on to just start #hashtagging stuff even if the feature didn't formally exist. many other users caught on, and joined in on using their hash keys to tag their posts.
soon enough, the ability to see all the tweets in a group was made official, and the #hashtag as we know it was born.
messina never patented the idea, feeling it was "born of the internet" and "should be owned by no one," and twitter's own adoption of the idea followed a trend within the company of seeing how users use their platform, and building official features around the functionality that users came up with. other examples of this include @ tagging, retweets, quote tweets, and the ability to post entire threads at once.
