Facebook announced on Friday that the social network will roll out a new feature on its News Feed: animated GIF support. This follows Twitter's decision to cave in and support GIF animation last summer.
The move by the social media giant has been long-awaited, as it opted to introduce auto-playing video support in 2013. Facebook has previously claimed that animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) support would make its News Feed chaotic, according to PC Mag.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg's company has been cautiously optimistic about using animated GIFs. It has included built-in GIF support for quite a while. However, Facebook argued that the image format would result in low-quality memes (e.g. "planking," Harlem Shake).
To use the new Facebook feature, users can paste the link of a GIF that is hosted on another website, such as Tumblr, Giphy, or Huhu into the status update box. After the user's post, the GIF animation will then be published.
The GIFs will auto-play on Facebook with users' current settings for video autoplay. They can tap or click an animated GIF to disable autoplay.
Today's announcement means that Facebook GIF support is official. In the past, the social network only supported Giphy GIFs.
The new animated GIF feature might be launched on Facebook's personal profiles first, according to Tech Crunch. In its official statement Facebook stated that it is "rolling out" the animated GIFs feature in News Feed.
There are now more online sites to find GIFs, including Imgur's new Video to GIF site, which turns a TV episode, music video, or home movie into a looping animation. Also, Hulu's new GIF site allows users to browse emoji-like GIFs, or TV-themed GIF animations.
The GIF was invented in 1987 by Steve Wilhite while he worked at Compuserve. Although the JPEG format compresses photos better, GIFs provide superior uniform color for a maximum of 256 colors in the entire picture.