Animated GIFs may be the best thing to ever happen to the Internet. They capture a moment. They replay infinitely. And, most importantly, hundreds of them already capture all the ways you feel. (Yup, every day.)
Now, Giphy---the GIF startup backed by reportedly $80 million in venture funding---wants to capitalize on our collective love for GIFs by ensuring you have endless examples at your fingertips no matter where you are. Today, Giphy launched a new keyboard, aptly named Giphy Keys, that lets you incorporate the animated moments seamlessly into your texts, messages, or social media posts from your phone. To access the GIFs, you download an app and tweak your settings to allow your phone to recognize the GIF-fueled keyboard. After switching keyboards in, say, an iMessage, you can then search, browse, and save GIFs to copy-and-paste quickly to your friends.
For Giphy, the opportunity here is pretty clear. Much like emoji, animated GIFs have become a popular way to express an emotion or make a pop culture reference with an image rather than text. The company has already worked to incorporate its GIFs into Facebook, Slack, and Twitter. Sure, GIFs aren't new, and GIF keyboards aren't either. But we, the people of the Internet, love GIFs, and Giphy has a major searchable treasure trove of them. "Anybody can speak in GIFs," says Julie Logan, Giphy's director of brand strategy. "They're made for the mobile messaging world that we really exist in now."
Now Giphy wants to make sure that even in our most private messages we can also easily share GIFs. In doing so, Giphy is embracing what Facebook, Snapchat, and other major companies have come to see as well: we're spending a whole lot more time on our phones. We gravitate to certain social apps, like Facebook, (Facebook owned) Instagram, and Snapchat. But we’re also spending a lot of our time in private messages, be it in texts or with apps like (the also Facebook owned) Messenger and WhatsApp.
Our one-on-one and group messages capture our attention perhaps more than anything else. But as brands and advertisers seek to capture our eyeballs, they’re having a harder time reaching us in those intimate places. Some like Broad City and Coke have tried emoji keyboards. For major companies like Facebook, Snapchat, and even Giphy, finding the ways into that space---or to dominate that space---are crucial for their future.
After all, Facebook and Snapchat, for example, depend on being able to figure out ways to serve us up ads. That's easy enough to do in News Feed or Snapchat Discover. It's a lot harder to do seamlessly in our messages and our messaging apps. And yet it doesn't seem too hard to imagine, say, Giphy one day featuring sponsored GIFs directly in your keyboard. (The company says it currently does not have sponsored or promoted GIFs.)
For you, Giphy Keys are ultimately another fun way to add a little attitude to your texts. (Done with your friend's latest idea? Shut it down.) But for Giphy, integrating seamlessly into your life and becoming a part of the way you communicate means a very real future. Or, at the very least, a way into a closed off and intimate part of your life.
