Twitter is known for testing new features to random users and they always find people offguard all the time. There was the like button test which finally came to replace the favourite button and the poll test that launched in September. Now there is another test, which is a welcome feature in my case: A dedicated GIF button
According to a report by Techcrunch, there have been screenshots posted on Twitter about the existence of a GIF button that is positioned between the media and poll buttons. It looks something like this:
If people aren't seeing it yet twttr is testing way cool gif feature. cc @bluechoochoo pic.twitter.com/LuTsVeUiSs
— Phil Pearlman (@ppearlman) February 4, 2016
It didn’t last for long however and this didn’t prevent people from posting screenshots of the new button.
oh it. has. immediately disappeared again.
well. there was a gif button in the tweeting screen & you could search some kind of gif library— alex༟ (@linedrag) February 4, 2016
As revealed in the above tweet, when you tapped on the gif button, you were able to search on a gif library, which is reminiscent of what we have on Facebook Messenger. In Facebook Messenger’s case however, you may have to install Giphy for Messenger so as to browse for the perfect gif.
It is still unclear what Twitter is using as the GIF library but Giphy could partner with the company to provide the gif library. Or the company could decide to go the Telegram Messenger with its excellent inline bots where you summon a gif by writing a name. In Telegram’s case, the gifs have been optimised so well in that they load relatively way faster than in traditional gif libraries.
Twitter could be doing this to make the gif usage more interesting and since they introduced the functionality a while ago, they may have data on its high usage. I also hope they make it possible to add several gifs in a tweet like Tumblr but that could be a long shot.
