Anil Dash gives animated GIFs his seal of approval through an historical treatise on the maligned artform.
What’s truly remarkable about Dash’s essay is that it only includes one example of an established online editorial product using animated gifs. (If you’re curious, it was The New York Times.) I know it’s just anecdotal—I doubt Dash did a comprehensive review of all editorial sites for this piece—but his findings are hard to argue with, since my own experience would seem to back him up: editorial websites have not embraced animated gifs.
Mind you, this is not important because I am some aficionado of animated gifs (although like Dash, I do share an affinity for the format), but it points to a general lack of experimentation in design at large editorial sites.
[Found via BetaBeat]
Anil Dash is worried about the ephemeral nature of Twitter and Facebook …
1) Blog more.
2) “I should make a pitch that this is part of the reason I am so enamored of the work the ThinkUp community is doing. A free, thriving, powerful, relatively accessible app that archives Twitter and Facebook updates with a mind towards incorporating them into more persistent and meaningful media is an essential part of the ecosystem.”
I am intrigued by this ThinkUp. I wonder if this could be coupled with products like Storify and Chirpstory, since I’m not entirely sure they’re built to deal with the issue of disappearing tweets.
