Image: Anthony Quintano/Flickr
Get ready for even more GIFs to populate your Twitter timeline.Twitter on Wednesday began rolling out the ability to search for animated GIFs directly from a tweet or direct message. While Twitter has supported GIFs since late 2013, users previously had to find them on websites like Giphy, then manually copy/paste the link into the tweet. Now, users can merely click the integrated GIF button inside the tweet composition window, then either search by keyword ("cat," for example) or browse GIF-filled categories like Applause, Awesome, and Deal With It.
GIF search is powered by Giphy and Riffsy, and will roll out over the next few weeks to all users on Android, iOS, and the web.On the surface this may seem like just a simple feature that Twitter is merely adding for the fun of it, but it actually speaks to a larger trend: augmenting text communication with visual cues like GIFs and emoji. It was only last year that several dedicated GIF creation apps were released for smartphones, letting users, say, turn videos of their adorable pets into social media-ready GIFs. And more recently, news website Quartz's new iPhone app (which has earned rave reviews) makes extensive use of emoji in its user interface to maximize screen real estate. Heck, Quartz in June 2015 even released a dedicated emoji keyboard for the iPhone.Of course, making Twitter more appealing to everyday people—who doesn't like GIFs?—and not just power users is the underlying thread of Jack Dorsey's second stint as CEO, as exemplified by features like Moments (which curates interesting tweets so people don't have to hunt them down on their own) and the algorithmic timeline (which places interesting tweets at the top of users' timelines).Now here's one of my favorite GIFs to mark the occasion:via GIPHY
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