Someone built a 30+ person company around animated GIFs. And they say there isn't a bubble...
It's like saying that Pinterest is a photo album. Or that Twitter is just a blog engine with 140 characters. Completely correct. Completely missing the point.
Its one my main sources of entertainment( imgur). There is an explosion of information/media on the internet and we need new formats, presentation to reign that in and make it palatable. I don't think its as stupid as you are making it out to be. There is huge potential in this space.
Plenty of 30+ person magazines or topic you've never heard of (Or there used to be - now they are 5 person websites).
I am assuming from this announcement that Giphy's Series C pitch deck was just one slide saying "we have a partnership with Twitter; give us money."
There's a weird trend of taking full HD YouTube videos, converting them to soundless, bad quality GIFs and then upload them to twitter or imgur, where they're then encoded back to video. Quite often this goes without source to the original. I assume that people doing this just want to show the important content on the respective platform rather than sending a link (although twitter and reddit embed YouTube videos). Or is there another reason?
By the way, Tumblr had this feature for ages: even the icon is completely identical. [1]
How a court would rule isn't clear.
*assuming they are copying a clip from a movie or show. Ripping off someone's original gif would turn this factor against them since they copy the whole thing.
But aside from the seriousness of this feature, I think there's something crucial here - and it's where emojiis were pointing at - its easier to tell a story with a picture, and pictures can cross the language barrier. I expect there to be more and more reaction images / gifs across Twitter, Facebook, even on hacker news on day. I bet that in 2 years either HN will have animated gifs, or it will be less busy and people will be somewhere else where there are some.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/chat-app-kiks-newest-featur...
That is not a snarky response.
I really prefer gifs to all these goofy icons and odd emoji (still use thumbs up etc, just not the poop and other odd ones).
I use Line App for chat with a group for a game I play, and they all love those stickers and emojis. Most of the time I don't even register what it is, and move on - gifs are a bit more eye catching and usually more poignant.
:badger badger badger badger:
From a technology perspective, dealing in GIF at this obnoxious volume will be needlessly expensive and difficult to scale.
Perhaps GIPHY has convinced VCs that they are a new medium within the 'storytelling' trend that many brands are latching on to. But I don't see GIPHY being able to scale this product successfully to the point where they can start monetizing, without having to abandon their antiquated file format.
