You can celebrate! Twitter announced yesterday that it will support animated GIFs on Twitter as well as on its Iphone and Android mobile apps.

To be technical, the letters “GIF” actually stand for “Graphics Interchange Format,” which is a compressed image file format that can be quickly transmitted over a network or the Internet. In simpler terms, it’s a short and almost always hilarious video clip.

For example, here’s an ungrateful birthday dog:

gif

Until today, GIF links could be shared on Twitter but users would be redirected to a new page to view the clip. Then, users would have to click back to Twitter to continue scrolling through their news feed.

GIFs have become tremendously popular in the social media sphere and there are sites dedicated to the viewing of GIFs (be warned: these can be addicting) including #Whatshouldwecallme, GIFs from Last Night and Animal GIFs.

This is big news for GIF lovers and brands that want to tweet GIFs. Get ready for moving media on Twitter!

cat

littlegirls

racoon

squirrel

Hopefully these made you laugh!