Alas, Messina, now 38, did not monetize his idea, but it did change social media history.In 2007, Twitter was a year old and Chris Messina was a tech product designer running his own internet consulting company. Messina and his Silicon Valley friends were using Twitter, but found the endless, unorganized scroll of tweets made it next to impossible to isolate groups of messages around a certain topic.
"So, I started to kind of experiment and put down symbols in front of words and places that I was going to, you know, just kind of trying to get the ball off the ground," says Messina.Of course, at that point, putting a hashtag in front of a word or phrase in a Twitter post did not automatically create a channel or link to anything.
that Messina walked into Twitter's "grungy office" and pitched the hashtag idea to Stone and a few other Twitter employees while they "were working frantically to fix a tech issue that had brought Twitter down, as was often the case in those early days."
MakeIt Hashtag