Twitter Website and Apps Get Support for Animated Gifs
Twitter
has finally given the gift of gif animation to its millions of users. The
feature is available for Android, iOS and Web users.
Twitter
announced the much-wanted gif animation feature via a tweet from its Twitter Support
account stating "Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on
http://Twitter.com , Android and iPhone," followed by a gif animation.
It
has been noted that users on Android and iOS would
be able to watch the gif animations by tapping on a dedicated play button. The
gif images will not animate automatically as to prevent users from downloading
any unwanted data. Users can upload gif images via the gallery button the same
way in which normal images are uploaded.
Notably,
Twitter users before the introduction of this feature could only upload video
content via the Vine application and gif animations via third-party apps like TwitPic or Giphy.
Additionally,
it has been understood that while other social websites like Tumblr and Pinterest already
have this feature, Facebook is still adamant on not including the gif animation
feature (as noted by The Verge)
, as it believes they will make the News Feeds look not so appealing.
Last
week, some Twitter users reported an update being rolled out containing
the new tweet embedding feature. Some users also reported the Bing translation
feature to have rolled out to theiPhone and iPad apps.
It's still not clear whether Twitter is rolling out this feature to all users,
or if it is something the company is testing in certain areas.