Founder of the Hashtag: Chris Messina on How to Set Trends

Chris Messina, the technologist who proposed the hashtag on Twitter in 2007, traces how his thinking was shaped by growing up a "social chameleon" in homogenous New Hampshire and discovering the early internet in the mid-90s. He recounts how an arrest as a teenager and the friction of public school made him aware of privilege, power structures, and gatekeepers, and how that drove his work across open source, the Firefox launch, co-working, and decentralized social networking. A recurring thread is timing: he argues the hashtag only worked because of a narrow window when phones, Twitter, and 140-character limits collided.

On the hashtag itself, Messina explains it grew out of a real problem at South by Southwest 2007, borrowing the channel idea from IRC, and had to pass his "drunk test" to stay simple enough for anyone to use. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone dismissed it as too nerdy, and the relationship stayed adversarial through a later trademark fight, yet Messina deliberately never monetized it. He closes on where he sees technology heading, including conversational AI and agents becoming intimate participants in daily life, and on a legacy focused less on inventions than on helping people make better choices about the tools he helped create.