GIFs have become an integral part of major social networks and due to their “lifelike” nature, they are quite popular. We can credit Tumblr for making them cool again which later on trickled down to other social networks.
Twitter has had GIF support for a while now and it is quite popular. The only problem was that you had to look for the GIFs outside Twitter, download them and later upload them on your tweet. This is rather laborious and there is a workaround for this. Online GIF repositories like Giphy partner with the likes of Facebook Messenger and Telegram to provide users with an easy way to search for the particular reaction gif of choice. Twitter was spotted two weeks ago with the same strategy where a dedicated GIF button was spotted on the official apps. Well now, they made it official.
The GIFs are coming! Get ready to search and send GIFs in Tweets and Direct Messages: https://t.co/uk75stt1zN pic.twitter.com/1dDD1B4CW2
— Twitter (@twitter) February 17, 2016
The update lets you search around the GIF library which Twitter has partnered with Giphy and Riffsy. You can search by keywords or check the various categories to discover the GIF of choice. That is not all, you can be able to send GIFs on the DMs, which was not possible before.
The new update will be rolled out to all users on the official Android and iOS apps as well as on twitter.com. Twitter revealed that 100 million GIFs were shared last year and this new update will definitely boost make the GIF usage on the network. I hope the GIF integration is as good as Telegram Messenger’s integration which in my opinion is the best around.
