While this may not be a big deal to some, avid and constant users of Twitter can rejoice today because the platform finally supports GIFs. Google’s own Google+ social network was actually the first of the big three to support GIFs and Facebook’s own Facebook chat that is built into the Facebook desktop client also supports GIFs. However, Facebook has not brought GIF support to any other platform or any other part of Facebook, including the most important part, the Timeline.
You can test it out yourself by simply posting a tweet with a GIF that you’ve uploaded and anyone that wishes to see it simply has to hit play and the GIF will play. Obviously, it would be nice for there to be an option for them to autoplay somewhere on Twitter, but I suspect that would cause undo burden on Twitter’s servers when it may not be necessary. Even the Twitter mobile apps support GIF images, which goes well beyond anything Facebook has been able to do in terms of features. The real truth is that GIF images are popular little snippets of video and people love to communicate things with them because of their ease of use and brevity. The next step for Twitter would be to extract GIFs from links and display them that way, since actually saving a GIF and uploading it is going to be a very unlikely use case.
We won’t get into the whole “GIF vs JIF” pronunciation of the GIF image format, but we will let you guys check it out for yourselves, including some amusing tweets about the feature launch from some Twitter employees that were involved in its development. Like we said, sometimes humor is best conveyed through short snippets of video overlayed with a slight bit of text. So, go ahead and have some fun with Twitter GIFs, even if they need a bit of work.
