Animated GIF Support Comes To Twitter

Oh you’re definitely going to love this little change from Twitter! The world’s most popular microblogging service announced today that support for animated GIFs has now been added to Twitter on the web as well as the mobile applications. The support has already gone live , so animated GIFs can now be viewed on Twitter.com and its apps on Android and iOS.

Twitter made this announcement through a Tweet, no surprises there, and demonstrated how animated GIFs will look like on the microblogging network. That particular GIF is a jab at recent debates about the pronunciation of the format, some including its inventor Steve Wilhite say “JIF” is the correct pronunciation whereas a lot of others have simply made their peace with calling it “GIF.”

Apart from adding support on the web and in its applications, Twitter has also rolled out GIF support to its APIs. This means that third party developers will be allowed to offer the same support in their Twitter clients as well.

Twitter joins the likes on Tumblr and Pinterest who support animated GIFs. There’s no debating the format’s popularity on the internet and its quite likely that Twitter users are going to appreciate this change.

Facebook users are still out of luck though. The world’s largest social network says it won’t support GIFs because its likely to make the News Feed of its users chaotic. It remains to be seen if Facebook will change its stance following Twitter’s move to add support.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: GIFs, Twitter