Tweet this Project

Twitter uses a system of hashtags to organize the millions of conversations that are all happening simultaneously. A hashtag is a keyword or phrase preceded by the pound sign: #.

Twitter’s system of hashtags is an organic creation—invented not by Twitter, but by Twitter-user Chris Messina in August of 2007—to help users organize their conversations around topic areas. There is no hashtag registration process. There is no monitoring service. People create and insert hashtags into their messages as they please for a number of different reasons.

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter, you’ve no doubt seen them in the wild already. People sometimes append them to their messages to indicate the type of message.