The Union-Leader’s Dave Pierce has a profile of a local boy (Manchester West grad who grew up Bedford) who developed the hashtag for social-media sites in 2007. The article is here.
As an early technology user, Messina first tweeted the idea to his followers and then wrote a 2,000-word blog post that laid out how hashtags would work. He decided to bring the idea to Twitter’s headquarters, just down the street from where he had been living in San Francisco since 2004.
“That kind of got the ball rolling for people to realize, one, that Twitter could be used for more than just what you had for breakfast. That was actually a useful tool for citizen journalism,” he said. “And then two, this new hashtag thing was a way to coordinate around topics.”
Messina continued to push his idea, but it didn’t gain traction until Instagram came out in 2010 and started using hashtags.
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Lotus Notes included something called ‘categories’ and allowed you to flag a single entry with multiple categoties. These values then were grouped together in views. It was an incredible feature for tagging entries. This feature has been available since at least the mid 90’s. Since Notes is generally used for business-centric/internal apps and, thus, had no traction with the general population.