IT’S been 10 years already? On this day a decade ago, open-source advocate Chris Messina proposed using a pound sign (hello, fellow mIRC tambay! Remember this?) to tag topics of interest on Twitter. His tweet was the first ever to include what is now commonly known as a hashtag.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— ⌗ChrisMessina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

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Today, an average of a jaw-dropping 125 million hashtags are shared every day on Twitter. In the Philippines, these are the ones that made it to the “most popular hashtags ever” list:

1. #PHElections. The use of social media during the 2016 Philippine national elections has been the most aggressive thus far. The online campaign for the next set of national leaders will probably be more intense than last year’s.
2. #AlDub. The love team that launched 11 million tweets a day. And it all started when Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza were paired in the July 16, 2015, episode of noontime show Eat Bulaga.
3. #OTWOL. Used by fans to talk about the romantic-comedy TV show On the Wings of Love, which starred Nadine Lustre and James Reid.
4. #KathNiel. The 2011 teen drama Growing Up gave birth to the love team of Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla.
5. #EpilogueInManila. The July 2016 concert of Korean boyband Bangtan Boys or BTS in the Philippines showed how big of a K-pop — or Korean POP — fan Filipinos are.
6. #LawinPH. Super Typhoon Haima, locally named Lawin, left 18 people dead when it hit the Philippines in 2013. It also incurred P10.2 billion worth of agricultural losses.
7. #Haiyan. #Haiyan was the international name of Super Typhoon Yolanda. The death toll from the storm that ravaged the Philippines in 2013 was estimated at more than 10,000 in Tacloban City, Leyte, alone.
8. #PapalVisitPH. Smart Communications claimed that there were more than 3.3 million tweets that were related to Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines in January 2015. The number was said to have peaked at 3,664 tweets per second on January 15.
9. #MissUniverse2015. Nothing screams “The Philippines is a beauty-pageant country” than the 2015 Miss Universe contest, where Pia Wurtzbach became the third Filipina to win the title, after Gloria Diaz in 1969 and Margarita Moran in 1973.
10. #WalangPasok. The hashtag often used to announce cancellation of classes. This one usually makes it to trending lists during the typhoon season.

READ ALSO: Most popular emoji in PH + other emoji facts

Main image via Student Life

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