UPDATE: While Facebook added support for natively posting GIFs, the ability to leave them in comments was not added---thankfully, a new Chrome extension just launched which can do exactly that. Facebook GIF button allows you to leave GIFs in comments without leaving Facebook. And the animated takeover continues.
Facebook, after much, much ado, has finally added GIF support. And no, not the halfway-workaround that it launched two years ago. There's now a real way to post a GIF in your status update, making words just that much less necessary to this whole internet thing.
It's easy: Just drop the link to the GIF of choice in the status update bar, and post away. GIFs can come from wherever as well---Imgur, Tumblr, a Google Image search, wherever. Before, we were hemmed in by needing Giphy's catalog (which remains excellent, for the record), but no longer. It appears that right now, the feature is still rolling out and while most users can post GIFs, Pages (for businesses or publishers) do not have access yet.
But whenever we all are graced with GIFs, the upside is that there's zero learning curve. It's really as easy as entering a link to the image in your update bar, letting it load like you would any other link, and then hitting post. (Pro tip, after the GIF populates, delete the link up top---do this with any link you post to make it look cleaner.) Here's a GIF tutorial on how posting GIFs works, in case you wanted a meta layer to this news.
A small "GIF" icon will appear in the middle of the image. Press, and enjoy. And repeat. And post GIFs! This is a big day, let's celebrate a little. Here's what the posts will look like:
Now all that's left to do is find the perfect Friday morning GIF---might I suggest this or this or this or this?
