Happy DMing With Instagram Supporting GIPHY's GIFs In Direct Message

GIF is like a language. It speaks beyond words, and can describe almost anything imaginable with just looping scenes.

While there are many fully-fledged communication apps to send messages privately, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and others, There are still that "direct messaging" embedded in other not-so-dedicated apps for communication.

Like Instagram or Twitter, their DM feature is just a supplementary feature that compliments their social networks.

But it doesn't mean that the feature can't be improved.

Despite people use DM to message others privately and aren't expecting anything much, Instagram adds support for GIPHY's GIFs so users can send those looping personal thoughts in a one-on-one message or group chat.

Rolling out to all users using Instagram on Android and iOS, this marks Instagram is slowly but surely building out its DM feature.

This is considered a smart move since Instagram is increasingly becoming a platform for younger users that no longer use Facebook, or never have been to Facebook.

To access the feature, Instagram has added a GIF button within Direct. From there, users can quickly search for trending GIFs by using keywords for specific ones. Or, they can use a 'random' option which makes GIPHY to quickly pick random GIF based on their keyword search term.

Instagram is stressing that every GIF shared through the feature includes attribution for content creators, so users can know who created the animation they’re sharing. Instagram is also including a “see all by creator” option to help promote creators and their work on the platform.

GIPHY is an online database and search engine that allows users to search and share short looping videos resembling animated GIFs.

With hundreds of millions of daily active users using both its API and website, GIPHY has been serving hundreds of millions of monthly active users. It does this by partnering with various social media apps so they can integrate its GIFs for years.

From WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Slack and others, GIFs do help users send their thoughts instead of actually creating text for thoughts.

GIPHY has been available Instagram's Story Stickers, which allows users to put moving images on top of their Story posts.

So here, the inclusion of GIPHY's GIFs to Direct isn't really a big change to Instagram.

Published: 
21/09/2018