#Hashtag

For over six years, the hashtag has steadily managed to permeate not only online social media, but also news, politics, and even ordinary conversation. Its influence is overwhelmingly apparent in our society and has created a standard for connecting thoughts, opinions, and feelings through simple, non-space-separated phrases. What is so impressive about the hashtag is that what it represents, a label for categorization, a tag, has been around for far more than six years. Paired with the ambiguous ‘#’ symbol, though, the concept of tagging spread like a wildfire through posts on Twitter and status updates on Facebook.

The practice of tagging online content with keywords has existed since the late 1990s as a way for content creators to make their work more accessible to users. Flickr popularized this idea with the ability to tag pictures with textual metadata, making it easier for users to find pictures associated with certain keywords. The idea was quickly adopted by many social websites including YouTube and Blogger, and search engines such as Google could utilize these tags to index web pages, creating a universal hub for online content.

Facebook and Twitter allow users to create concise “statuses” or brief thoughts which are shared with friends and followers. This lowered the barrier of content creation to individuals less willing to maintain a blog or create videos, but would rather express a simple thought through a limited amount of words or characters. In addition to making it easier for users to generate content, Twitter introduced the hashtag, a simple way to tag micro-posts. In 2009, Twitter began to link hashtags in tweets to search results for the hashtagged phrase and suddenly the hashtag came to life. Similar to its predecessor, the hashtag differs in that it is embedded within the text of the status or micro-post which it is tagging and is universally identified with the “hash” symbol ‘#’.

The hash symbol, an ambiguous icon commonplace on most keyboards and dial pads has many names and purposes. It has been used to designate numerical values, weight in “pounds” (hence why the symbol is sometimes called the “pound” symbol), and more recently the hashtag. Other icons that accompany the hash on most keyboards, such as the exclamation point, dollar sign, percentage symbol, and so forth, have clear purposes and would be awkward if used in place of the hash.

Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter collect and connect hashtagged tweets and posts to generate massive databases of crowdsourced trends, which algorithms and statisticians can use to gauge public opinion, predict events, and accomplish a number of other things. The hashtag is both attractive to users and powerful to data scientists. While users follow trends and create posts, businesses and applications listen to the resulting stream of information, using it to maintain a connection with the society which surrounds them.