Sharing pictures and videos is great and all, but everyone knows the real media supergiant of the internet is the humble gif. Short for “Graphics Interchange Format,” gifs are simple moving images with no sound that typically run for a few seconds and then loop indefinitely.

In its neverending quest to absorb all forms of media, social media giant Facebook Inc has finally gotten around to enabling native gif support on its social network, and it will be both the best and the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The best—because gifs are bite-sized chunks of content that even the shortest attention spans can enjoy. The worst—because you are probably about to see a flood of them invading your newsfeed.

Gifs have been made increasingly popular over the last few years thanks to sites like Reddit and Tumblr, but they have actually been around for close to 30 years. Below is an early example of a gif from the pre-selfie era of the internet (circa 1995 CE):

Using gifs on Facebook now works the same way as sharing any other link on the site: simply copy the image URL into a status update and post it to Facebook. Unfortunately, it looks like you can’t actually upload the gifs themselves to Facebook the same way you would a normal image, but you can always use an image hosting site like Imgur.

While normal users can already start sharing gifs, it looks like the functionality has not been enabled for Pages. Facebook has yet to confirm whether this will change in the future.

On the correct way to pronounce “gif”

With gifs finally hitting the 1.3 billion-strong Facebook crowd, now is a good time to cover something very important: the right way to say gif. You may think you know the correct way to pronounce gif. Well in fact, you are wrong. It is actually pronounced the other way.

You see while normally you would pronounce the “g” the same way you do in golf or giraffe, in the word gif you pronounce it the same way you would in gypsy or gold. So all this time you have been saying gif, you should have actually been saying gif instead. Pretty embarrassing.

And do not even get me started on the way you say Linux.

Photo by Robert Scoble
The Interview gif via hero0fwar | Imgur