Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Rolls Out GIF Button (usatoday.com)
Twitter is rolling out a new GIF button on iOS, Android, and the Web so users can now search for GIFs by keyword. They can then insert them directly into their tweets and direct messages with a single tap. According to Twitter, "more than 100 million GIFs were shared on Twitter last year... [the company] is looking to GIFs as another way to increase engagement on the service that is struggling with slowing user growth."
So, whose GIFs can you share? Surely sharing on Twitter to share a GIF doesn't give Twitter and the rest of the world the right to use it?
Twitter seems to be assuming anything posted is fair game for everybody else to reuse.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Civilization is saved.
Since their user base is dropping every month and their investors have gotten out the long knives, they've hit upon this scheme to entice lawyers to join the service and log in frequently, looking for cases they can prosecute on behalf of Big Media clients. Up to this point, lawyers, known for their long-windedness, have shied away from Twitter due to its 140-character limitations...
Why the sudden implementation of gifs now? They're about 15 years too late... shouldn't they be pushing for gifv/webm?
Maybe the Twitterverse can finally lay rest the argument over Giraffe or Gift pronunciation argument.
The only thing I ever found it to be useful for is outage tracking. Prior to taking it onto a self-hosted server a time keeping application I wrote was hosted by a hosting company. If there was an access problem I turned to twitter to see if others were complaining about outages. I remember something about some dude destroying something in a substation that took the entire city of Provo Utah offline, that's where my program was hosted. I didn't find the official explanation until the next day, but people on Twitter were bitching about it within an hour.
>> Is there anyone here who even uses their Twitter account if they have one?
As a "write only" dump of scheduled thoughts, as part of my job, yes. In the past I've also used it when I'm at a conference to meet up with other people who I want to hang out with for a night, but don't really want to keep in touch with when the conference is over.
>> For you people who hate Facebook, do you hate Twitter or Facebook more?
Twitter, probably. My wife still reads Facebook and communicates with some other moms that way. Every once a while someone's husband will invite me to run a race, have some beers or clean them out in poker via some Facebook communication via the wives, so I can't hate it that much.
I hate facebook more at least twitter has a bit of redeeming value that you can use it to contact developers and while most still won't bother to grace you with a reply you are still better off tweeting than email if you want a reply.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
This company is worth tens of billions of dollars. They just increased their value by 40% by this "GIF sharing" technology in the cloud.
I for one am really excited about this new feature:
https://i.imgur.com/P82GvlT.gi...
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
You are welcome on my lawn.
LZW (and by extension GIF) isn't patented any more. It expired about twelve years ago.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Oddly enough I've found a couple of uses for this.
Companies tend to respond quickly to tweets so it's handy to contact them with questions, etc.
I'm in a 'group' of like minded hobby people that lends itself to the 140 character limit when sharing information.
If not for the second one I wouldn't be on Twitter tho. That's the useful part for me and as long as it stays useful I'll keep my account active.
More cat animated gifs.. #WTF #NoThankYou
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
for those who are challenged by the use of overly complex things like writing and speaking. How soon until the masses speak a different language on the street and can't even comprehend the language the laws are written in or business is conducted in. Makes controlling them much easier... :(
This post brought to you by the letter
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I have a Twitter and a Facebook account. I follow NASA, CERN, LHC, JPL, ESA, etc. Occasionally my tablet reminds me I have tweets to read. Even more rarely, I click the notification. Then I wait for the Twitter app to load (no idea why it takes so long but tablet is old) just to realize I've wasted 30 seconds of my life, even with those "channels."
My Facebook account only exists because occasionally people will link me things on IRC I need it to see.
I wouldn't say I hate either. I'm largely indifferent. I only get irritated when some social justice drama queen throws a temper tantrum on Twitter that makes the news. Honestly, both services could shutter tomorrow and the only way it would affect me would be various friends and acquaintances complaining about Facebook being no more. I don't know anybody who regularly uses Twitter so I'd have to wait until /. or the red site ran something to find out that one shut down.
Twitter's hemorrhaging on all counts as they continue to enable and even hire some of the most toxic bigots and abusers on their platform while shadowbanning and harassing those people's victims.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Wow, a button that lets you insert a GIF. This bold innovation is almost off the scale.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Nope.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The United States LZW patent expired on 20 June 2003. The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on 18 June 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on 20 June 2004, and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on 7 July 2004. Consequently, while Unisys has further patents and patent applications relating to improvements to the LZW technique, the GIF format may now be used freely.
That's a hard gee, FYI. I don't care who says otherwise.
Which part of #RIPTwitter don't you GET?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You cannot be serious, is this a sample of the brand new technology focused slashdot, a gif that you can insert into your twitter feeds?
I have an account that I created so I could log into a site that required an account linked to a social network.
Only found a couple actual uses for it:
-Play by play updates from things like a utility or DOT during a storm
-Bleeding edge breaking news. Once the city was on lockdown because there was a gunman on the loose. There were updates on that, and rumours when they caught him, then the Police posted on their Twitter that they caught him. This was long before a news release.
Other time sensitive matters. Once in the middle of the Christmas parade there was an unexpected huge gap. A quick check on twitter showed that there was a medical emergency further down the street, and indicated when it was going again.
That's about it. Extreme time sensitive, bleeding edge information. It's useless as a crappy substitute for an RSS feeder, or to find out what Justin Bieber is thinking.
I also don't understand Vines. Seems like Youtube for people with no attention span.
I got into the twitter game late, earlyish 2011, and i'm still using it.
A quick check reveals that, loosely grouped, of the 79 people i follow, 27 are personal friends, 18 are authors (because i'm a SF/F nerd,) 7 are what i'm calling group/event accounts (conventions, meetup groups, etc), 5 are musical artists, 5 are minor geeky celebrities, 5 are "joke" accounts (Emo Kylo Ren being one of the most recent examples) 4 are themed accounts (pictures of cute animals, pictures of people doing dumb things, etc), 4 are internet friends that i've never met in person, and 4 are food trucks.
So in general my rational uses are keeping in touch with friends, keeping abreast of events (usually on a smaller and more personal scale,) and being entertained.
The advantage of twitter over choosing to "just follow blog updates of my favorite artists/devs via a web scrapper" is that A: i don't have to create/edit a web scapper, and B: honestly these days i don't seem to have time to keep up with writing my own blog much less reading everyone else's. There are some days where i can't even keep up with twitter and some stuff falls off the edge into the abyss. (Which in some ways is a nice feature, since that way i'm not tempted to go back and catch up from where i last left off. Unlike, for example, podcasts, where i'm currently stuck back in mid-2015 and gradually falling further and further behind.)
You can pick any demographic you care to name and some portion of it is on twitter. Award wining scientists, best selling artists, poor and struggling artists, famous celebrities, average joes, raging assholes, total idiots, famous movie stars, less famous TV stars, unheard of podcast "stars", restaurants, stores, libraries, events, etc.
So if you really hate the userbase, i guess you just hate the entire human race? Although it seems more likely you just don't have any cool friends on twitter and you're not very good at searching for content there and thus after a brief review you just think you hate the userbase.
As for hating the content... I've seen some very funny things said in 140 characters. I've seen some very profound things too. And of course i've seen even more things of interest linked from tweets. But it seems like a lot of people get a feeling of superiority out of hating on Twitter, and thus heap scorn on the idiotic tweets and users and without looking very hard for counter-examples. (And similarly for G+ as well, though presumably for entirely different reasons.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Not conservatives, but pretty much anyone that goes against a certain specific small clique that were given the keys of twitter now.
It is just disguised as a political debacle, but its actually "small group of very powerful individuals vs the rest of the world."
I've read a couple of articles recently form good sources that predict #Twitter is dying. True? I can only hope so.
I've found Google trends to be a good indicator of popularity.
Twitter vs Snapchat vs Instagram
I was surprised that Snapchat wasn't more popular, but you can see Twitter has been in decline since 2013, and Instagram is showing lots of growth (I guess lots of people want to take what improvements we made with digital imaging, and have shitty filters that look like crappy cameras, while they take selfies of their duck-face and their crappy food.
You can see Slashdot has been on a loooong decline into irrelevance
Oh and GIFs bottomed out in 2011, and have been rising, and are now back up to 2007 levels
Those are those things you download from CompuServe right?
It's useless as a crappy substitute for an RSS feeder, or to find out what Justin Bieber is thinking.
Well, there it is, my New Thing for today: a reason to consider getting on Twitter.
~$ fortune | cowsay
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Facebook - Mostly full of people reposting stupid pictures and "heartbreak" stories/pics of photoshopped mangled babies with captions like "Ignore if you want to burn in hell, like if you want to be saved by Jesus, Share if you're God"
Maybe you need to choose your "friends" more carefully.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Agreed. Whenever my teamviewer session can't start, I go check twitter to see if other people are having problems. If it's the service in general, I'm less concerned about my own equipment at that point.
Even before, users started to post pictures of big smileys instead of posting just a smiley (or more appropriate: Clicking the fab button without any reply).