Social media giant Facebook has bought popular GIF-making and sharing website Giphy and has announced its plans to integrate it with Instagram and other Facebook apps.
At the moment, Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet with tools such as creating, sharing, and remixing GIFs. For years, Facebook has used Giphy’s application program interface on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. All of these apps were already working with the service.
Giphy will now become part of Instagram with the aim of making it even easier to send GIFs and stickers in Instagram stories and direct messages. The popular photo-sharing site is owned by Facebook. Rest assured for GIF lovers, things will remain the same for Giphy users despite the integration of the Giphy with Instagram.
“People will still be able to upload GIFs; developers and API partners will continue to have the same access to Giphy’s APIs, and Giphy’s creative community will still be able to create great content,” Vishal Shah, Instagram’s VP of product, said in a blog post.
"We will continue to make Giphy openly available to the wider ecosystem.”
Before being bought by Facebook, Giphy was supplying GIFs to numerous apps such as Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit to name but a few, and it seems things will remain that way according to Facebook’s announcement. However, one can't help to think that all the other apps are competing with Facebook and it would be interesting to see how things would unfold.
A Facebook spokesman said Giphy’s current integrations with social platforms like Twitter, Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok would not change.
The spokesman also said GIFs have no online tracking mechanisms such as pixels or cookies.