#Throwback: Things We Didn't Know About #Hashtags Until Now
#Throwback #Hashtags #History #Origins #Music #SaysStories #NowIKnow #Eureka #HashtagsBeCray
By Mei Mei Chu — 26 Sep 2013, 06:10 PM — Updated almost 11 years ago
Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the #hashtag is killing our ability to write in coherent English, like this:
We are all familiar with the use of #hashtags in our social media posts, but do you know where it came from?
We are all familiar with the use of hashtags in our social media posts, but do you know where did it came from?
Image via enumclaw.com
#FirstAppearance: Dating back to the 12th century, # was used as a sharp sign in musical notation
The musical notation for sharp originated in 14th century German music publishing,
econtentmag.com#TheInvention: It was used in the 14th century as an abbreviation of the "pound" (lb) weight
Left, from the pen of Isaac Newton; right, detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia” (1698). Courtesy the Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Image via newyorker.comThe story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.”
newyorker.comLike many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar.
newyorker.comIt was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #.
newyorker.com#FirstUseInTech: It started as a joke in 1964
In 1964 AT&T telecommunication engineers jokingly referred to the fairly new symbol as an octotherp or octothorp(e).
econtentmag.comGood jokes spread among engineers and in 1968 the geeks at Bell Labs were finalizing the touch tone keypad and filled in the two bottom buttons on either side of the "0" with * and the #.
econtentmag.comThe first official record of the octothorp appears in a 1975 patent for the current telephone keypad that is still in use on your iPhone 5 call screen today.
econtentmag.com#FirstAppearanceOnInternet: Used in IRC networks to label groups and topics
Hashtags first appeared and were used within IRC networks to label groups and topics. They are also used to mark individual messages as relevant to a particular group, and to mark individual messages as belonging to a particular topic or "channel".
Generally, channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are appended with a hash symbol #.
#BirthOnTwitter: Chris Menna's first tweet in 2007 was a question
On August 23, 2007, the Twitter hashtag was born. Invented by Chris Messina (then with the consulting firm Citizen Agency, now an open web advocate for Google), the first tweet with a hashtag read as follows: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
gigaom.com#HashtagsExplosion: Twitter made hashtags clickable in 2009 and Twitter feeds exploded with #####
This allowed for easier searching of Twitter to find events, topics, and information that was relevant to you. Two years later in July of 2009, Twitter officially embraced hashtags and made them a clickable link that would show you other tweets using the same hashtag.
econtentmag.com#AdoptedByGoogle: Google + adopted the hashtags feature on its social network in 2012
Google+ introduced related hashtags, along with a number of other new features, in Sept 2012 in an effort to make the Google+ feed a little deeper and more interesting.
#Today: Hashtags in slowly creeping into our daily conversations, there's even a hand gesture for it
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