Chris Messina (open-source advocate)

Last updated

Chris Messina
Chris Messina - 2016.jpg
Messina in March 2016
Born
Christopher Reaves Messina

(1981-01-07) January 7, 1981 (age 43)
Bedford, New Hampshire, U.S.
Nationality American
Alma mater Carnegie Mellon University
Known forInventing the hashtag
Website http://chrismessina.me/

Christopher Reaves Messina (born January 7, 1981) is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms. [1] [2] [3] In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags. [4] The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific digger theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet. [5]

Contents

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

— Chris Messina's original Tweet proposing hashtag usage, August 23, 2007 [4]

Although Twitter's initial response to Messina's proposed use of hashtags was negative "these things are for nerds" [5] a series of events, including the devastating fire in San Diego County later that year, saw the first widespread use of #sandiegofire to allow users to easily track updates about the fire. The use of hashtags itself then eventually spread on Twitter, and by the end of the decade could be seen in most social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube, so much so that Instagram had to officially place a "30 hashtags" limit on its posts to prevent people from abusing the use of hashtags. [6] Instagrammers eventually circumvented this limit by posting hashtags in the comments section of their posts. [7] As of 2018, more than 85% of the top 50 websites by traffic on the Internet use hashtags. [8]

Messina subsequently went on to become the Developer Experience Lead at Uber from 2016 to 2017 [9] [10] and as of 2018 ranks as the No. 1 hunter on ProductHunt.com. He is a technology evangelist who is an advocate for open source, open standards, microformats, and OAuth. Messina is also known for his involvement in helping to create the BarCamp, Spread Firefox, and coworking movements. [11]

Career

Messina was employed as an Open Source Advocate at identity company Vidoop [ when? ] and before that was the co-founder of marketing agency Citizen Agency.[ when? ] He worked at Google as an Open Web Advocate,[ when? ] [12] leaving to join startup NeonMob. [13] He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 [14] with a BA in Communication Design. From 2016 to January 2017, Messina lead the Developer Experience team at Uber where he enforced the terms and conditions of Uber's proprietary APIs. [15] [16]

Messina co-founded Citizen Agency,[ when? ] a company which describes itself as "Internet consultancy that specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" [17] with Tara Hunt and Ben Metcalfe, who has since left the company.

Messina has been an advocate of open-source software, most notably Firefox and Flock. As a volunteer for the Spread Firefox campaign, he designed the 2004 Firefox advert which appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 2004. [18] In 2008, he won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Community Amplifier for BarCamp, Microformats and Spread Firefox. [19]

In February 2018, Messina launched Molly, an AMA-style website where the questions are answered using the person's social media posts. [20]

Inventing the hashtag

"I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea." Chris Messina, explaining why he didn't patent the hashtag[ citation needed ]

Social campaigns have begun to be titled in a hashtag form. The International Telecommunication Union approved in November 1988 a recommendation that put the hash sign on the right side of the 0 in the button arrangement for push buttons on telephones.[ citation needed ] This same arrangement is still used today in most software phones (see Android dialer for example). The ITU recommendation had 2 design options for the hash: a European version where the hash sign was built with a 90 degree angle and a North American version with an 80 degree angle. The North American version seems to have prevailed as most hash signs in Europe now follow the 80 degree inclination.[ citation needed ] The pound sign (not to confused with the pound currency sign) was adopted for use within IRC networks c. 1988[ citation needed ] to label groups and topics. Channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a hash symbol (as opposed to those local to a server, which use an ampersand). HTML has used # as a fragment identifier from the very start of the World-Wide Web (c. 1993). [21]

The use of the pound sign in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network.[ citation needed ] He posted the first hashtag on Twitter. Messina's suggestion to use the hashtag was not adopted by Twitter, but the practice took off after hashtags were widely used in tweets relating to the 2007 San Diego forest fires in Southern California. According to Messina, he suggested use of the hashtag to make it easy for "lay" users to search for content and find specific relevant updates; they were for people who do not have the technological knowledge to navigate the site. Therefore, the hashtag "was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages." Today they are for anyone, either with or without technical knowledge, to easily impose enough annotation to be useful without needing a more formal system or adhering to many technical details.

Internationally, the hashtag became a practice of writing style for Twitter posts during the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests; Twitter users inside and outside Iran used both English- and Persian-language hashtags in communications during the events. The first published use of the term "hash tag" was in a blog post by Stowe Boyd, "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings," on August 26, 2007, according to lexicographer Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee.

Both the #MeToo and #FreeTheNipple movements use hashtags in their title. 'freethenipple' hashtag.jpg
Both the #MeToo and #FreeTheNipple movements use hashtags in their title.

Beginning July 2, 2009, Twitter began to hyperlink all hashtags in tweets to Twitter search results for the hashtagged word (and for the standard spelling of commonly misspelled words). In 2010, Twitter introduced "Trending Topics" on the Twitter front page, displaying hashtags that are rapidly becoming popular. Twitter has an algorithm to tackle attempts to spam the trending list and ensure that hashtags trend naturally.

Although the hashtag started out most popularly on Twitter as the main social media platform for this use, the use has extended to other social media sites including Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Google+.

Press

Messina was featured with Hunt, also his ex-girlfriend, in "So Open it Hurts", in San Francisco Magazine (August 2008). The article detailed their very public and open relationship shared on the internet, and the lessons they derived from that experience. [22]

Related Research Articles

The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, hash, or pound sign. The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare ℔.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag (metadata)</span> Keyword assigned to information

In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.

Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary. Microformats emerged around 2005 and were predominantly designed for use by search engines, web syndication and aggregators such as RSS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BarCamp</span> International network of user-generated conferences

BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused on technology and the web. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early stage web applications, and were related to open-source technologies, social software, and open data formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2007 in science</span> Overview of the events of 2007 in science

The year 2007 involved many significant scientific events and discoveries, some of which are listed below.

Social network advertising, also known as "social media targeting," is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing focusing on social networking services. One of the significant benefits of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of the users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads appropriately.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mibbit</span> Web based IRC client

Mibbit is a web-based client for web browsers that supports Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Yahoo! Messenger, and Twitter. It is developed by Jimmy Moore and is designed around the Ajax model with a user interface written in JavaScript. It is the IRC application setup by default on Firefox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hashtag</span> Metadata tag prefixed with #

A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol, #. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as X or Tumblr as a form of user-generated tagging that enables cross-referencing of content by topic or theme. It is still sometimes known as the pound sign. For example, a search within Instagram for the hashtag #bluesky returns all posts that have been tagged with that term. After the initial hash symbol, a hashtag may include letters, numerals, or underscores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Instagram</span> Social media platform owned by Meta Platforms

Instagram is an photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.

Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media and television</span>

Social media and television have a number of connections and interrelationships that have led to the phenomenon of Social Television, which is an emerging communication digital technology that centers around real-time interactivity involving digital media displayed on television. The main idea behind Social Television is to make television consumption a more active content experience for audiences. In the 2010s, social media platforms and websites allow for television shows to be accessed online on a range of desktop and mobile computer devices, smartphones and smart TVs that are still evolving today in the 2020s. Alongside this, online users can use social media websites to share digital video clips or excerpts from TV shows with fellow fans or even share an entire show online. Many social media websites enable users to post online comments on the programs—both negative and positive—in a variety of ways. Viewers can actively participate while watching a TV program by posting comments online, and have their interactions viewed and responded to in real time by other viewers. Technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers allow viewers to watch downloaded digital files of TV shows or "stream" digital files of TV shows on a range of devices, both in the home and while on the go. In the 2020s, many television producers and broadcasters encourage active social media participation by viewers by posting "hashtags" on the TV screen during shows; these hashtags enable viewers to post online comments about the show, which may either be read by other social media users, or even, in some cases, displayed on the screen during the show.

The term twitter bomb or tweet bomb refers to posting numerous Tweets with the same hashtags and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of advertising a certain meme, usually by filling people's Tweet feeds with the same message, and making it a "trending topic" on Twitter. This may be done by individual users, fake accounts, or both.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Safe Browsing</span> Service that warns about malicious URLs

Google Safe Browsing is a service from Google that warns users when they attempt to navigate to a dangerous website or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors and helps them diagnose and resolve the problem. This protection works across Google products and is claimed to “power safer browsing experiences across the Internet”. It lists URLs for web resources that contain malware or phishing content. Browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and GNOME Web use these lists from Google Safe Browsing to check pages against potential threats. Google also provides a public API for the service.

Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term "feminism" claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of "feminism", all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others. Networked feminism is not spearheaded by one singular women's group. Rather, it is the manifestation of feminists' ability to leverage the internet to make traditionally unrepresented voices and viewpoints heard. Networked feminism occurs when social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are used as a catalyst in the promotion of feminist equality and in response to sexism. Users of these social media websites promote the advancement of feminism using tools such as viral Facebook groups and hashtags. These tools are used to push gender equality and call attention to those promoting anything otherwise. Online feminist work is a new engine of contemporary feminism. With the possibility of connecting and communicating all around the world through the Internet, no other form of activism in history has brought together and empowered so many people to take action on a singular issue.

Black Twitter is an internet community largely consisting of the Black diaspora of users on the social network X, focused on issues of interest to the black community Feminista Jones described it in Salon as "a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes." A similar Black Twitter community arose in South Africa in the early 2010s.

Hashtag activism refers to the use of Twitter's hashtags for Internet activism. The hashtag has become one of the many ways that social media contributes to civic engagement and social movements. The use of the hashtag on social media provides users with an opportunity to share information and opinions about social issues in a way that others (followers) can interact and engage as part of a larger conversation with the potential to create change. The hashtag itself consists of a word or phrase that is connected to a social or political issue, and fosters a place where discourse can occur. Social media provides an important platform for historically marginalized populations. Through the use of hashtags these groups are able to communicate, mobilize, and advocate for issues less visible to the mainstream.

Throwback Thursday or #TBT is an internet trend used among social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. On a Thursday, users will post nostalgia-inducing pictures – from a different era of their life, accompanied by the hashtag #TBT or #ThrowbackThursday. Many posts reflect positive moments, or funny, old clothes, hair and styles. Throwback Thursday can be attributed to any photo in one's past memories whether it be childhood, old relationships, past vacations, old songs, or anything that gives one a "happy and nostalgic feeling."

Social profiling is the process of constructing a social media user's profile using his or her social data. In general, profiling refers to the data science process of generating a person's profile with computerized algorithms and technology. There are various platforms for sharing this information with the proliferation of growing popular social networks, including but not limited to LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Brain Tumor Social Media (#BTSM) is a patient and care partner-run, grassroots Twitter community. The Twitter account @BTSMchat hosts bi-monthly tweet chats for the #BTSM community and consistently trends among the top 15 of disease-related tweet chats. A study published in 2020 revealed the hashtag was most commonly used by brain tumor patients (33.13%), along with patient advocacy organizations (7.01%), care partners (4.63%), and clinicians (3.63%) and researchers (3.37%) specializing in brain tumors and brain cancers.

Comparison of user features of messaging platforms refers to a comparison of all the various user features of various electronic instant messaging platforms. This includes a wide variety of resources; it includes standalone apps, platforms within websites, computer software, and various internal functions available on specific devices, such as iMessage for iPhones.

References

  1. ↑ Parker, Ashley (June 10, 2011). "Twitter's Secret Handshake". The New York Times. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
  2. ↑ "BBC News – Hashtag inventor: It was an 'accidental trip over a simple idea'". BBC. December 5, 2014. Retrieved December 5, 2014.
  3. ↑ "The Inventor of the Twitter Hashtag Explains Why He Didn't Patent It". Business Insider. Retrieved March 19, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Chris Messina [@chrismessina] (November 4, 2010). "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?" (Tweet). Retrieved September 30, 2019– via Twitter.
  5. 1 2 Panko, Ben (August 23, 2017). "A Decade Ago, the Hashtag Reshaped the Internet". Smithsonian. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  6. ↑ "How do I use hashtags? | Instagram Help Center". help.instagram.com. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  7. ↑ "Instagram Max Hashtags: How to post up to 60". itchban. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  8. ↑ "Website Ranking: Top Websites Rank In The World - SimilarWeb". www.similarweb.com. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  9. ↑ "Uber denies access to Harvard startup that compared ride-hailing prices". Boston.com. June 5, 2016. Retrieved June 6, 2016.
  10. ↑ (CMU), Carnegie Mellon University. "#OriginStory – Carnegie Mellon University | CMU". www.cmu.edu. Retrieved March 19, 2016.
  11. ↑ Fost, Dan (February 21, 2008). "Coworking, a cooperative for the modern age". The International Herald Tribune. iht.com. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  12. ↑ Happy Birthday, Chris Messina, And Enjoy Advocating The Open Web At Google. TechCrunch (January 7, 2010). Retrieved on 2014-05-23.
  13. ↑ Yesterday was my last day at Google Archived April 21, 2015, at the Wayback Machine .
  14. ↑ Messina, Chris. "Heading back to Pittsburgh". Twitter. Heading to Pittsburgh. Man, haven't been back since I graduated in 2003!
  15. ↑ "The guy who invented the hashtag is joining Uber to build the 'future'". Business Insider. Retrieved March 19, 2016.
  16. ↑ "Today is my last day at Uber". January 7, 2017. Retrieved January 7, 2017.
  17. ↑ CitizenAgency.com
  18. ↑ "Mozilla Foundation Places Two-Page Advocacy Ad in The New York Times". Mozilla. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  19. ↑ "Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards – Hall of Fame" . Retrieved September 17, 2011.
  20. ↑ Johnson, Khari (February 19, 2018). "Hashtag creator launches Molly to make a personal bot from your social media footprint". VentureBeat . Retrieved February 24, 2018.
  21. ↑ Berners-Lee, Tim (June 1994). "Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW". IETF Datatracker. Rfc1630. Archived from the original on November 11, 2023.
  22. ↑ Yeung, Bernice (July 15, 2008). "So open it hurts". Modern Luxury. Archived from the original on August 19, 2017. Retrieved August 23, 2017.

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