Social media platforms and GIFs were always going to marry together well, but over the past few years these two internet mainstays have become closer than ever. With sites like Twitter integrating a GIF search into the tweet input field, it’s now easier than ever to find the perfect reply for when words fail you.
It’s not just the average tweeter either; big name brands are getting in on the action. NASA uses GIFs to educate people about how space works, MTV uses them to simply bask in that #FridayFeeling and Starbucks created their own set of GIFs for the Frappuccino lovers to retweet to within an inch of their lives.
The use of moving image on websites isn’t a new phenomenon, and with 93% of human communication being visual it makes total sense for the Internet to be saturated with them, but I’m noticing the use of moving image more and more recently. An example being after watching a YouTube video, the suggested video thumbnails now appear as GIFs flicking through key frames of the video, which is an obvious way to show the highlights of the video before committing to watching it.
I find this crossover of images and video interesting, GIFs seem take the role of the bridge between the two image mediums. Deacon Webster, founder of Walrus, makes a good point that “when there’s a GIF somewhere on your screen, it’s hard not to look at it…”
