Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so what do you call this symbol pound sign number sign gate sharp octothorpe well while none of these are incorrect many people these days have gotten into the habit of calling it a hash sign or a hash tag after all those little identifiers to see all over Twitter Instagram and other social media services but why a hash symbol instead of something else well it turns out that shift 3 has been in use in the tech world for a long time if you're a coder you might know that it indicates something that should happen before the program is compiled if you're using the programming language C which has been around since the 1970s and even if you're not a coder you still might encounter them hash symbols were used to designate channels in the popular chat service IRC meaning hash tag sports would be maybe a good place to argue with football fans and this paradigm has also carried through to more modern chat platforms such as discord and slack it was actually this method of organizing chat rooms that gave one early adopter of Twitter the idea to use the same symbol to make it easy for users to search for all the tweets related to a particular topic and thus in 2007 the modern hashtag was born now the feature had no official support from Twitter but the site was fast becoming known as a place for up to the second news which made the hashtag a natural and useful complement to the posting style of many users especially when they were commenting on quickly developing current events and so by the summer of 2009 hashtags have become so popular that Twitter turned all hashtags into hyperlinks and heavily used hashtags in this trending feature that debuted in 2010 cementing their role as a topic identifier for what was currently popular and as other sites also look to become sources of trending news and discussion the hashtag found new homes on Instagram in 2011 Facebook in 2013 and YouTube in 2016 though you should bear in mind the hashtags don't function identically across sites in that some special characters will break a hashtag on some size but not on others just make sure that whatever you do you don't include any basis and to add even more effectiveness to the concept of a hashtag indicating a specific topic many organizations events sports teams political movements etc have attempted to promote specific official hashtags for their followers to use to help them gain more visibility on social media or to help organize tweets for things like Q&A sessions feedback from angry customers or contest entries now enterprising individual netizens have also found ways to turn the hash tag into expressions of their own personalities or feelings on a particular topic some of these are exceedingly clever while others look like they're from people who only have a very questionable grasp on how social media functions but no matter how you feel about the proliferation of hashtags their popularity is both a method to catalog vast numbers of social posts and a way for us to show the internet how clever we are means that it looks like they're here to stay and no joke there's even a soccer / football team in London called hashtag United FC you know sometimes I really do wonder if we're all just living in a giant mean and speaking of living in a giant meme do you not want your viewers to live in the giant meme instead to live on your website well then check out score space the simple powerful beautiful and easy way to build your own site you get 24/7 support via live chat and email it's only $12 a month and you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for the year it has a responsive design and your website will scale to look great on any device it has commerce features so that every website will come with a free online store and cover pages a feature that allows you to set up a beautiful one-page online presence in minutes and score space now features new conversion metrics you can track button clicks for submissions and more to track trends over time start a trial today with no credit card required and start building your website and when you decide assignment for Squarespace make sure to use the offer code Texan off your first purchase alright guys thanks for watching you know the drill by now like dislike check out our other channels leave a comment down below tell us what you'd like to see in future videos and don't forget to subscribe