Chris Messina (open source advocate)
| Chris Messina | |
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Chris Messina in March 2016
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| Born |
January 7, 1981 USA |
| Alma mater | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Occupation | Developer Experience Lead (Uber) |
Chris Messina (born January 7, 1981 in the USA) is a former American Developer Experience Lead at Uber, where he enforced the terms and conditions of Uber's proprietary APIs. Previously an open source and open standards advocate, Messina is best known for his idea to group messages on social media using a single character hash (#), now commonly known as Hashtags
The use of the number sign in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network. In 2007, he posted the first hashtag on Twitter:
How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina, ("factoryjoe"), August 23, 2007
Messina is also known for his involvement in helping to create the BarCamp, Spread Firefox, and coworking movements. Messina is an active proponent of microformats and OAuth.
Messina was employed as an Open Source Advocate at identity company Vidoop and before that was the co-founder of marketing agency Citizen Agency. He worked at Google as an Open Web Advocate, leaving to join startup NeonMob. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 with a BA in Communication Design. In 2016, Messina joined Uber to lead their Developer Experience team, but he left in January 2017.
Messina co-founded Citizen Agency, a company which describes itself as "Internet consultancy that specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" with Tara Hunt and Ben Metcalfe, who has since left the company.
Messina was an advocate of open-source, most notably Firefox and Flock. As a volunteer for the Spread Firefox campaign, he designed the 2004 Firefox advert which appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 2004. In 2008 he won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Community Amplifier for BarCamp, Microformats and Spread Firefox.
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