Here's how Facebook and GIPHY became friends again

Once upon a time, Facebook did not support GIFs. In fact, there was a time when Facebook supported the file format and then took that support away.

Developers tried to hack it. One group succeeded, in a way. GIPHY, one of the internet's most successful GIF-based plaftorms, built and launched a feature that let Facebook users share moving images on the site.

They weren't GIFs, Mashable's Lance Ulanoff reported back in 2013. As in they were not in the native GIF format, and yet, they were moving images in Facebook posts and comments, which people mistakenly referred to as GIFs. 

"You're right this is not native GIF format support but it is the first time you've been able to find a GIF on the Internet and then get it to play on Facebook," GIPHY founder and CTO Alex Chung wrote to Lance in an email. "We think that's really awesome. We hope Facebook will support the .gif native format someday and we are lobbying them to do so but that is up to them." Read more...