GIFs are now available on Facebook messaging threads

Recently, Facebook’s News Feed became progressively filled with rich media. Long text posts are becoming not as common as pictures, auto play videos and text on colored backgrounds.

Now, even Facebook’s reply thread is getting a lot more animated.

Celebrating 30 years of GIFs, Facebook introduced an all new GIF comment button. All you have to do is comment on a post and click the special button. GIFs were introduced to Facebook Messenger in 2015, and they are so popular that users are sending 25,000 every minute. In fact, Facebook revealed that there have been 13 billion GIFs sent over the last year alone.

Facebook teamed up with GIPHY and GIPHY Studios to create special GIFs featuring internet stars, and you can find them by searching for different hashtags.

Facebook revealed that there have been 13 billion sent GIFs over the last year. (Source)

Nevertheless, this feature is not something new for other social media platforms. Twitter, WhatsApp and the commercial messaging service Slack have previously included GIF search and send options in their message threads. One possible reason why Facebook hasn’t done it before is that they have been pushing the live video platform first, as well as the ability to post 360-degree videos.

Facebook also wants to settle, once and for all, the non-ending dilemma of how “GIF” is pronounced: whether the G is hard or soft. While accepting the Webby Award, the creator of the animated image indicated that the right pronunciation is “jiff”. But Facebook is still not happy, as it’s currently hosting a poll, asking users in the United States to give their opinion on the right word pronunciation.

GIF stands for ‘Graphic Interchange Format.’ It represents a bitmap image format that was developed by Steve Wilhite while working at BBS provider back in 1987. Due to its wide support and portability, it came into widespread usage on the net.