Twitter celebrates hashtags turning ten

Twitter is today celebrating the tenth anniversary of the hashtag with a 24-hour custom emoji.

First suggested by software designer Chris Messina, the company now claims an average of 125 million hashtags are shared each day, despite Twitter’s management being initially being sceptical of the idea.

Chris Messina, inventor of the Twitter hashtag

In a 2011 Quora post, Messina described how Twitter originally dismissed his idea: “I never imagined that hashtags would catch on as they did — especially since Ev[an Williams] specifically told me that Twitter would instead use machine learning to group tweets and that hashtags were too “nerdy” to ever go mainstream.”