UK Edition
Ten years ago today an icon of the social media age was born: the hashtag. The small character, which started life as an organisational tool, has become part of common parlance in the past decade.
The idea to use the # to organise tweets and groups on Twitter was first suggested on August 23, 2007, by former Google and Uber designer Chris Messina. The 1,186th user on Twitter, Messina posted a message asking fellow users what they thought about using the hashtag to collate people and messages.
At the time, the 140-character network had been around for more than a year and had hundreds of thousands of users.
Before the formal introduction of the hashtag as an organisation tool in September 2007, the social network had reached a number of milestones that would shape its use for a decade. It had introduced @mentions and @replies, launched a mobile version, and defined Twitter associates as followers.
Here are seven facts you didn't know about the hashtag.
First ever hashtag
The first hashtag to be used on Twitter was Messina's sample #barcamp. Barcamp is a loosely structured network of people that run user-generated conferences about technology and the internet. The first Barcamp was held in 2015 in California. The largest ever one was in 2013 in Myanmar, which had 6,400 attendees.
In the first year after the invention of the hashtag icon, the most used was #noticias, the Spanish term for news.
Most popular hashtag of all time
Setting a record of being tweeted 1 billion times, #NowPlaying (or #np) is the most shared hashtag of all time.
The most popular regularly occurring hashtag tradition is #FF, which stands for #FollowFriday and has been used more than half a billion times since it was first tweeted in January 2009.
The most used hashtag on Twitter in 2016 was #Rio2016, closely followed by #Election2016 and #PokemonGo.
How many hashtags are used a day
Around 125 million hashtags are shared by Twitter's 328 million users every day. The popular icon has since been picked up by other social networks, including Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook.
Most infuriating hashtag
An infuriating craze that swept the world in 2015 became a game, internet meme and hashtag. #TheDress plagued Twitter users for weeks as they tried to decide if the dress was indeed white and gold or blue and black.
Longest ever hashtag
The Guinness World Record for the longest ever hashtag was awarded in 2013 to Paul Horner, author of Super Official News. The dizzying hashtag was 345 characters long, not including the #, and told a rude story about Horner's life.
Hashtag is officially a term in the dictionary
The term hashtag was added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2014. The definition said: "A word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorises the accompanying text (such as a tweet)."
Hashtag emoji
Twitter is celebrating the birth of the cultural symbol with a new emoji.