Name Chris Messina Role Open source advocate | ||
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Born January 7, 1981 (age 43) ( 1981-01-07 ) USA Occupation Open Web Advocate (Google)Open Source Advocate Similar People Sergey Brin, David Drummond, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt Profiles | ||
Organizations founded Citizen Agency | ||
Christopher Reaves Messina (born January 7, 1981) is an American technology evangelist who is an advocate for open source and open standards. Messina is best known for proposing the use of the hashtag character (#) on Twitter as a way of grouping messages. Inspired by the use of the hashtag in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Messina's original tweet appeared as follows:
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How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina, ("factoryjoe"), August 23, 2007
He was formerly Developer Experience Lead at Uber from 2016 to 2017. 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.
Career
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. From 2016 to January 2017, Messina lead the Developer Experience team at Uber where he enforced the terms and conditions of Uber's proprietary APIs.
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.
Press
Messina was featured with Hunt, also his ex-girlfriend, in "So Open it Hurts", in San Francisco Magazine (August 2008). The article detailed their very public and open relationship shared on the internet, and the lessons they derived from that experience.