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2013·The social era

Giphy

A search engine for feelings, which is what a GIF library turns out to be.

An early online video

The story

What this was

A GIF search engine that became infrastructure: integrated into messaging apps and social platforms until picking a reaction from it was an ordinary part of typing. It made the GIF a shared vocabulary rather than a file people kept.

It first appeared in 2013, during the social era.

You were there

More from 2013

The same internet

The social era

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A GIF search engine that became infrastructure: integrated into messaging apps and social platforms until picking a reaction from it was an ordinary part of typing. It made the GIF a shared vocabulary rather than a file people kept.
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