Chris Messina

Christopher Reaves Messina (born January 7, 1981) is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who proposed the usage 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 bigger theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy 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. quote|How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?|Chris Messina's original Tweet proposing hashtag usage, August 23, 2007 Instagrammers eventually circumvented this limit by posting hashtags in the comments section of their posts. , 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 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.

Career Messina was employed as an Open Source Advocate at identity company Vidoop and before that was the co-founder of marketing agency Citizen Agency. He worked at Google as an Open Web Advocate, leaving to join startup NeonMob. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 with a BA in Communication Design. From 2016 to January 2017, Messina lead the Developer Experience team at Uber where he enforced the terms and conditions of Uber's proprietary APIs.

Messina co-founded Citizen Agency, a company which describes itself as an "Internet consultancy that specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" with Tara Hunt and Ben Metcalfe, who has since left the company.

Messina has been an advocate of open-source software, most notably Firefox and the now-discontinued Flock browser. As a volunteer for the Spread Firefox campaign, he designed the 2004 Firefox advert which appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 2004. In 2008, he won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Community Amplifier for BarCamp, Microformats and Spread Firefox.

In February 2018, Messina launched Molly, an AMA-style website where the questions are answered using the person's social media posts.

Proposing the hashtag quote|"I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea." Chris Messina, explaining why he didn't patent the hashtag to label groups and topics. Channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a hash symbol (as opposed to those local to a server, which use an ampersand). HTML has used # as a fragment identifier from the very start of the World-Wide Web .

The use of the pound sign in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network.