Giphy enables embeddable GIFs on Facebook

GIF website Giphy has a new sharing feature for Facebook that allows GIFs to work in your news feed.

There are two things we want to do with Facebook — none of this "couples pages" or "celebrity verification". What we really want is text formatting (italics, anyone?) and the ability to embed GIFs on our timelines.

The former is still an impossibility, and Facebook itself has yet to enable the latter, but a third-party website has jumped in and created a workaround.

"We did it," Giphy said in a blog post. "GIFs on Facebook! Giphy's got all the GIFs, and now you can share them with your friends on Facebook. You can embed them right onto your timeline from our site."

All you have to do is go to any GIF page on the site and click the "Facebook" button. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the "Share GIF" URL into a post, just like you would share a link.

Alas, the GIF doesn't load automatically: just like with YouTube videos, you and your friends will have to click a button to "play" the GIF. So it ain't perfect, but it's a danged sight better than what we had before. Just a word to the wise, though: based on our "experiments", it seems to be working for some users and not others.

Head on over to Giphy to try it out for yourself.