Pinterest, a popular virtual pin-board, now offers support for animated gif images. These files are compressed images which were designed for faster uploads.
Pinterest enhances their website
The website’s official blog post elaborated on Thursday, “The well-timed GIF may be the greatest thing to have happened to the internet since emoticons, and lots of people have said they’d love to see playable GIFs on Pinterest. Starting today, we support GIFs in all their animated glory!”
When users pin animatd GIF images to their pinboards, they will see a play and pause button on the lower left corner. These buttons will make it easy for the user to see the image without having to go directly to the source. HNGN added, “However, that doesn’t mean that users can make their pinned images move whenever they want to or not – rather, the button can only be seen on the animated GIFs found in Pinterest’s main feed, by category searches, and search results pages. Also, users cannot play it on their mobile phones yet.”
Pinterest’s rising popularity
Pinterest is one of the more popular social media platforms. What sets it apart from other social media websites like Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) or Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is that it’s all about the photos. But unlike the very personal photo sharing application Instagram, Pinterest focuses on projects and ideas. A recent report from Wired shows that people use Pinterest more often than email to share things with their friends. The only websites to top Pinterest were Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks to the immense popularity of Pinterest, it’s not surprising advertisers want to get in on the action. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) already have ads like Promoted Stories and Sponsored Tweets. These ads don’t seem to deter users from using their websites. It’s only a matter of time until Pinterest starts adding advertised pins.
