Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Ten years of Hashtag 08-23

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Hashtag has completed ten years of its existence. We are today celebrating ten years of association
with the Hashtag. It has become an inseparable part of our social media content sharing activity.. 

What is Hashtag???

It is a metatag that is used for sharing content on social media platforms to attract the bots of search engines, and classify all the words implying the same meaning together. known as the hash character # in reference to its resemblance to several slices or chops with a sharp implement) Hashtag helps you to find all the content at place in relation to a subject,topic, event,place or an individual.

Twitter the micro blogging site which was launched in 2006, caught the imagination of the people immdetially, but it was not able to technically sustain its structure and often crashed on account of load of traffic or technical bugs. 

It was during one of such technical hitch in 2007, that Biz Stone, one of the founders, who was trying to fix along with his technicians, a person named Chris Messina walked into Twitter office and explained about the Hashtag and suggested its integration into Twitter infrastructure. It was not immediately accepted but was later on integrated in to twitter web infrastructure. 

On 23rd August 2007 Hashtag first appeared in the tweet by Chris Messina. After that it was integrated into the Twitter system. AND NOW 125 MILLLION HASTAGS (#) ARE BEING USED ON TWITTER DAILY.

Later it was widely adopted across websites, blogs and social media platforms like Facebook, Google+ and others. it was also accepted across almost all the news publishing websites.

LinkedIn did not recognise the Hash tag till a considerable period. In fact, once, after I cross posted conent on LinkedIn, I received a message from someone at LinkedIn telling me that, there was no use of cross posting content with Hashtags, as LinkedIn did not recognise Hashtags. However this year in March, when LinkedIn went in for a major makeover, Hashtag  started working on the LinkedIn timelines.

It is now widely used to get attention and create trends for people, events, places, and other things. Because of its widespread use, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014.[2

Metatags, social media platforms, and later day evolution.

In the early stages of the web history, the website used to have metatags on their web pages. The metatags are texts that are hidden from the viewers but visible to the search engine bots (short for robot).  The metatag text was used to tell the search engines bots the nature of the website. the subject, the domain specificity, and any lineage it had to any organization. The search engines used to scan the web pages and pick up the metatags and place it in proper category. When a person searched for a particular information relating to any aspect, on a search engine like Google or others, all the webpages belonging to  the topic searched used to show in the search. The order depended on many factors, one of the factors being  the websites with maximum traffic relating to that topic, which were featured at the top. However there were other parameters also which decided the sequence in the search results.

First it was required to manually register your websites on the search engines. There were many agencies with the required software, who could register your website simultaneously on more than hundred search engines with a single click. There were also many search engine optimisation agencies which promised to get a better ranking for your website against payment. and it was difficult separate the genuine one from the fake ones. These people exploited the innocent web owners, who innocently fell into the trap.

In view of this exploitation and with the advancement of the  search technology,  metatags were done away with, and  Search Engine bots used high end technology to scan web pages and categorise and segment information based on various parameters, which evolved from time to time. 

When internet became more accessible in developing countries, post the millennium, social media platforms also became more accessible to people. Google had its Orkut, Microsoft and Yahoo had their messenger. However everything changed when Facebook was launched in 2003. Facebook with unique feature not only captured most of the social media market share, it also attracted more people to social media. Its domination was so complete, the other media platforms almost went into wilderness. Google retired its Orkut.  Google introduced wave micro blogging platform with a lot of features and strong search engine support from Google. However Wave could not sustain itself  in the face almost total domination from Facebook and twitter. Wave was withdrawn and a new platform Google+ was launched.

Now with the advent of mobile social platform WhatsApp, even Facebook and Twiter are struggling for existence. Though Facebook claims to have crossed 2 billion mark, it is finding it difficult to make its members log into their accounts regularly.


The future belongs to the mobile media platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. WeChat the Chinese mobile social media platform is growing by hordes and claims a membership of more than a million.The other mobile media platforms that have come recently are also consolidating themselves and in not too distant a future they will present a challenge to the established media platforms.

Hope you have liked this article . Please feel free to express your opinion.

Best Wishes, 

Shyam





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