The moment we’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. No…it’s not exactly the invention of a hoverboard like Marty McFly rocked in Back to the Future II & III–and it’s DEFINITELY not a cure for cancer–or even male pattern baldness. But, it’s still one small step for mankind and one huge leap for our Facebook feeds as we know it.
Facebook Will Now Support GIFs!
Last week Facebook officially confirmed that they soon will be able to support animated GIFs. They’re finally catching up to the likes of Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Reddit, and Imgur.
“We built support for animated GIFs to help people express themselves in fun new ways on Facebook. Like many features that we release on Facebook, we want to ensure that this drives a great experience for people first before rolling it out more widely. While Pages cannot currently post GIFs, we are exploring ways to enable this in the future,” said Facebook in a statement to Forbes.
How to control GIFs in your News Feed:
Your “Auto-play” settings will control whether or not you’ll be exposed to the automatic loops of GIFs, just like videos have been doing for a while now. All you have to do on a desktop version of FB is head to your settings, go to the videos part, and then Auto-Play Videos. The “Auto-play” setting on your mobile device can be found under settings, then “Videos and Photos.” When you don’t have your auto-play enabled, GIFs will show up with a white circle and “GIF” written on the image. You can just tap it to watch it.
Are GIFs the New Choice for Social Media Advertising?
Back in December 2013, Facebook introduced paid video ads to our feeds. However, they chose not to enable GIF capability due to a concern over the “aesthetic impact” it might have on our Facebook page. Facebook is likely trying out this new feature on personal pages first and there still is no official word on whether GIFs will be available on pages for FB ads. GIFs have been around since the late ’80s, but gained popularity in the ’90s when Angelfire and GeoCities were all the rage. And then of course, how could we forget all those tacky glittery GIFs that we saw all over Myspace back in the day.
However, GIFs have been making a HUGE comeback thanks to our love of those Buzzfeed articles like “25 Times Taylor Swift Perfectly Summed Up Why Your Boyfriend is Really a Pumpkin Spice Latte” littered with funny TV and movie GIFs that we all adore.
What do you think about Facebook adding GIFS?
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