Native GIF search is now part of messaging apps from Tinder to Facebook Messenger, and starting today you can see it on Twitter as well. The company said today that it will begin rolling out a GIF button on iOS, Android, and the web. Tap it and you can search for GIFs using keywords, then insert them into your tweets and direct messages with a tap. The feature is powered by GIF search engines Riffsy and Giphy.
The GIF button appears in the tweet composer in between the buttons for adding photos and polls. Twitter expects it to be heavily used: people added 100 million GIFs to their tweets last year, the company says. The move comes a few weeks after Tinder added GIF search to messaging, and about four months after GIF search came to Messenger. Giphy also offers a popular integration inside workplace messaging app Slack.
Companies like Giphy are betting that the feature becomes ubiquitous so that it can one day begin selling “promoted GIFs” to advertisers. The company, which does not currently earn any revenue, announced this week that it had raised $55 million at an eye-popping valuation of $300 million.
