Skip to main content

Facebook Confirms It Will Officially Support GIFs



Facebook this afternoon confirmed that it will now support animated GIFs in the Facebook News Feed. Not everyone will see the added functionality immediately, we understand, as the update is still rolling out. The move represents a significant change in direction for Facebook, which has historically made a conscious decision to avoid supporting GIFs, claiming that doing so would make its News Feed “too chaotic.”

Instead of allowing GIFs, Facebook’s focus to date has been on video. The company introduced support for auto-playing videos in late 2013, but despite bringing a more lively, animated feel to the News Feed, the move did not lead Facebook to rolling out support for GIFs. Neither did the introduction of support for GIFs on Twitter last summer — a change that some felt might force Facebook’s hand in the matter.

Though Facebook had built in support for GIFs for quite some time, the company has long felt that GIFs could lead to the site being cluttered with low-quality memes, as we previously reported.

That decision, however, has been reversed today.
fb-gif
To try the new feature, Facebook users can paste a link to a GIF hosted on an external website like Giphy, Imgur, Tumblr, or elsewhere, into their status update box and then publish. The GIF will be animated inline after you post. You can’t currently upload GIFs directly, however, and see the same results.

GIFs will auto-play on Facebook in line with your current video autoplay settings. If you choose to disable autoplay in your settings, you can tap or click a GIF (as indicated by “GIF” in a white circle on the image) to play it instead.

Before today, the only option for sharing GIFs on Facebook was a workaround provided by Giphy, but this was not considered official Facebook support. Today’s update means that users will be able to share GIFs they find anywhere on the web to Facebook, not only from a single source.

We’ve tested the functionality on Facebook brand pages, and found that the above steps don’t work. That implies that Facebook is either rolling out the feature to personal profiles first, or it has made the decision to restrict the functionality from being used by brands period. (Update: We understand now that Facebook will not support GIFs on Pages or in Facebook ads.)

We also found that GIFs were automatically animated in the Facebook native mobile application, but not on the mobile website. It’s unclear at this time whether or not the latter issue is related to a delayed rollout, and have asked Facebook to confirm.

We’ve also asked Facebook to provide further technical details surrounding its GIF support, including its plans for mobile support, Pages support, and more. We’ll update when the company responds. In the meantime, a company spokesperson provided the following statement:

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...
Post a Comment
Read more