On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the creation of the animated GIF format, all users of the social networking site Facebook will receive a new mobile button that the company started testing three months ago.
Facebook also announced that 13 billion "dry" images had been sent via Messenger over the past year, and that 400 million images had been sent only on New Year's Day 2017.
The JEF button will allow users to search for animated images from various services such as Giphy and Tenor and publish them directly in the Comments Box. In the desktop browsers version, the "JV" button will also display the most animated images, just like Facebook Messenger.
Facebook had added animation support two years ago, but until recently users had to write the web address of the animation, while the button made the process much easier, especially on the phone.
The animation button is currently available for comment, but the company may eventually make it available to News Feed because users' motion for animation does not show any signs of decline.
According to reports, Facebook has been supporting the animation for years before it was finally added, but was hesitant to publish it because of the visual impact it could have on feeding the news.
For fun, and on the occasion of the first anniversary of the presentation of images first dried by CompuServe in 1987, Facebook launched a survey asking users how to pronounce the word "gif", a debate that is still raging even though the co-ordinator Steve Wilheit announced
Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/14/facebook-gif-comments/?ncid%3Dmobilenavtrend/