What do TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have in common? It's the hashtag: invented by a man of the internet, Chris Messina. Throughout his career, Chris has worked on movements online and offline that have helped define social media and social technology broadly. If you've used Firefox, attended a BarCamp event, or even checked in at a co-working space, then you're more than familiar with Chris' widespread impact.
James sat down with Chris to learn more about the hashtag and to see how a simple feature proposed via a tweet evolved social media basically everywhere on the internet.
Chris Messina has spent a decade working on social technologies, designing products and experiences, working with startups, and changing the world by giving away many of his creations, including the hashtag.
His skillset is broad, anchored in product and user experience design. He has created movements online and off, and has acted as an effective agent of change in large and small organizations.
In 2004, he helped organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. In 2005, he co-organized the first BarCamp and then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world. In 2006, he opened the first dedicated coworking space in San Francisco, giving rise to a global movement. Then in 2007, he brought the idea for the hashtag to Twitter, changing social media forever and galvanizing social revolutions across the globe.
During his time at Google as a Developer Advocate, he lead the creation of Google Developers as a brand and central hub for all of Google’s developer tools, services, and documentation. Later, as a UX designer on the Google+ team, he redesigned the Google Profile, unifying 46 discrete representations of a person across the company's various products. He also lead the efforts to design Google+’s publisher platform offerings, including the +1 button and other embeddable publisher widgets.
He has spoken at conferences like SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, Google I/O, and Microsoft's Future Decoded, and has frequently been quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, and Wired.
Chris Messina
James Evans
CommandBar
