Chris Messina (open-source advocate), Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetChris Messina (open-source advocate)
American blogger
Date of Birth: 07-Jan-1981
Place of Birth: United States of America, United States
Profession: technology evangelist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Capricorn 
About Chris Messina (open-source advocate)
- Christopher Reaves Messina (born January 7, 1981) is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms.
- In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags.
- The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content.
- It allowed easy, informal markup of folk taxonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language.
- Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet. How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups.
- As in #barcamp [msg]? Although Twitter's initial response to Messina's proposed use of hashtags was negative "these things are for nerds" a series of events, including the devastating fire in San Diego County later that year, saw the first widespread use of #sandiegofire to allow users to easily track updates about the fire.
- The use of hashtags itself then eventually spread like wild-fire on Twitter, and by the end of the decade could be seen in most social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube.
- So much so that Instagram had to officially place a "30 hashtags" limit on its posts to prevent people from abusing the use of hashtags.
- Instagrammers eventually circumvented this limit by posting hashtags in the comments section of their posts.
- As of 2018 more than 85% of the top 50 websites by traffic on the Internet use hashtags.Messina subsequently went on to become the Developer Experience Lead at Uber from 2016 to 2017.
- And as of 2018 ranks as the No.
- 1 hunter on ProductHunt.com.
- He is a technology evangelist who is an advocate for open source, open standards, microformats, and OAuth.
- Messina is also known for his involvement in helping to create the BarCamp, Spread Firefox, and coworking movements.
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