UPDATED 23:33 EDT / FEBRUARY 19 2015

NEWS

Buzzfeed acquires animated gif app maker GoPop

gopopBuzzfeed Inc. has acquired animated gif app maker GoPop (Zeega Inc.) for an undisclosed price.

Based in San Francisco, GoPop offered an iOS app that allowed users to blend multiple images into an animated gif, or what they called “a Pop.”

In their own words:

We saw that the web was giving rise to a new visual language, a collective lexicon being invented by people recording media on their phones, writing phrases on top of still images, or mining cultural history to create GIFs. We created GoPop to try and make this shared vocabulary available to everyone.

Under the deal four GoPop employees will work on Buzzfeed’s mobile team further developing the current Buzzfeed app and working on experimental apps. Co-founder Kara Oehler will be leaving the company to pursue the making of a documentary and to undertake unspecified journalism.

The GoPop app has been withdrawn from sale and support for making “Pops” will end in two weeks time. The team committed though to host “a public archive of all Pops ever created, where each user will have a web profile with all of the Pops they’ve ever made.”

It probably goes without saying that Buzzfeed buying a company that does animated gifs isn’t at all surprising given Buzzfeed’s near ubiquitous obsession in using them in just about every single thing they put online.

The acquisition seems to be more of a talent buy than an acquisition of the underlying tech, although talk of “experimental apps” at Buzzfeed could eventually lead to Buzzfeed itself coming out with a similar animated gif making app sometime in the future.


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