Pound symbol was officially repurposed into the hashtag on Twitter in 2007 by a former Google designer named Chris Messina to group related conversations together.

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Pound symbol was officially repurposed into the hashtag on Twitter in 2007 by a former Google designer named Chris Messina to group related conversations together. He literally just asked his followers how they felt about using the symbol for groups, completely unaware that he was about to alter the fabric of global marketing forever. Twitter initially rejected the idea entirely, telling him that it was way too nerdy and that mainstream users would never adopt such a bizarre coding convention. Naturally, the internet ignored the corporate executives, and within a few years, people were physically saying the word hashtag out loud in real conversations, much to the horror of linguistic purists everywhere. What started as a clever organizational tool for tech geeks has devolved into a desperate SEO tactic where influencers string together fifty irrelevant tags just to get more views on their breakfast photos