 By the way, just check Twitter a little while ago. And apparently, I'm in China right now. Or the Kenyan president's in China. Hi, everyone over there. How are you? Oh, good, good. So this is going to be a little bit different from the last two presentations. But thematically, it's exactly the same. And for everyone over there, this is going to be the first talk, and probably the only talk at the entire conference, where you're completely allowed to stare at nothing but the entire time. So please, go ahead and do that. You know, I want to talk about GIFs, because it's funny how much we look at our own computers and we kind of miss things that are always there, like file types, right? That three-letter thing at the end that says .pdf, or .doc, or .mp4. We kind of look past that. We ignore it, because it's kind of not important to us. And there are a few exceptions, of course. But the fact that we do this is kind of a shame, because there's this really, really long, intense history behind each of these file types. And until recently, GIF was one of them. Or sorry, GIF. But today I'm talking about GIF. GIF was one of these extensions, because we stopped paying attention to it, because it became a file format that was all of a sudden kind of uninteresting, right? And that's kind of changed. Right now, GIF is kind of up there with MP3. Like, you talk about GIF and people are like, oh yeah, yeah, the animations, right? Yeah, like, people know what that means, right? And just like MP3, you know, the format's kind of been around forever, it took a while for GIF to get there. In fact, nearly 30 years now, right? And that's kind of weird, right? Because when people talk about technology, it's always the newest, latest thing, and everyone's really getting into it. And everyone's gonna all move over to this new thing, and then, yeah. We expect these technologies to go obsolete. GIF is inefficient, right? JPEG, oh, you can make beautiful photos with JPEG, right? But GIF, what are you gonna do with GIF, right? Flash, Flash, oh my God, Flash has so much sort of like corporate backing and had everyone trying to say, you have to use Flash, it is the future. How many of you went out and became Flash developers? Right? You don't have to raise your hand, don't be embarrassed, it's okay. You know, there's money and corporations and power behind a format like Flash, and GIF didn't have any of that, right? GIF had, GIF had, it didn't have institutional power, right? It didn't have the support of large corporations. It had people, and people made it happen over years, and it happened over a very long period of time, and it was completely emergent, and it happened from the ground up, and that's why I find the story of GIF so incredibly fascinating, and it's because it's not actually about the file format itself, it's not actually about the technology, and that is why actually I love conferences like this, it's one of the least techy conferences I ever speak at, and it's because it understands it's not about the technology, it's about the culture, it's about the people, right? It's about the community, it's about the communication, and it's about all the things that actually make something go from being a completely obsolete format that nobody thinks about for decades until all of a sudden we find a new use for it, and so I kinda wanna talk to you about the history of the GIF, but I wanna talk to you about it as a story, because I'm really big into mythology, right? And I think we need a new mythology, especially online. We talk about everything that's happening with memes in other countries, we talk about the elastic self, we talk about ways, a lot of people coming together and participating, and finding ways to actually build things from the ground up, this emergent behavior, and there's no good mythology for that right now, there's no good mythology of what's actually happening on the internet right now, and so I thought, you know what? I'm actually gonna tell the real history of GIF, which isn't necessarily but the facts of it, right? I'm gonna fudge the facts a little bit, so for those of you who kinda pay attention to that thing, just kinda cold your ears, but I'm gonna tell the story of GIF as if it's a fairy tale. I'm gonna tell you the true story of the rise of the animated GIF as told as musingly, of course, through a loose interpretation of the fairy tale Snow White. Now, once upon a time, there was a king named Browser and a queen named CompuServe, and CompuServe, one day she kinda wished for an image format that could play short animations but still be supported by any Browser without plugins, and one day, such a format was born. They named her GIF 89A and they issued the spec, and it was a wonderful day. The problem was that soon after CompuServe died, got absorbed by AOL, but whatever. So everyone kinda went along their lives and so a respectful amount of time later, King Browser remarries and his new wife is so useful, but she's also arrogant and she requires plugins and constant updating and she's a tremendous CPU hog. But hey, this doesn't matter because we're in a time of broadband and Mr. Moore says that CPUs are doubling in speed every year so we don't have to worry about that sort of thing, right? So the new queen, her name is Flash and meanwhile, the young GIF being a bit of a novelty because nobody really takes her seriously, of course, right? She's limited to 256 colors and she doesn't render very well and everything else, but she finds work anyway, right? Because that's what you wanna do as a file format. You wanna be useful, right? And so she starts rendering rainbows and unicorns and under construction animations for the neighborhoods of Geocities and Lycos and tripod.com and she doesn't mind doing this because she likes doing this. She likes making short animations and the new queen, meanwhile, she possesses this magic mirror called tech blogs, right? Which she goes to and asks every morning, magic blog coverage, who is the most beautiful, most useful format of all? And the magic mirror always replies, why you, of course, Flash, because you are the most useful in the land, you play back huge video files and you can support other file formats and you're like a multimedia CD-ROM and, you know, for the web and you're fine. And so the queen is pleased because of course the blogs never lie. And then one day when all the tech blogs are tensioned on social networking, GIF meets MySpace. And on MySpace, she's used everywhere. So even though all the major online properties have begun using Flash, the queen is kind of paranoid. And so she banishes GIF to the forest of depreciation and subcultures. Deprecation and subcultures. And she hopes that GIF is gonna die off from lack of formal support and corporate mainstream backing. And so GIF goes off into the forest and she's kind of sad and she kind of wanders the subcultures, you know, for days before finally she meets the trolls of, I mean, sorry, the dwarves, the dwarves of internet forums and they're called 4chan and Beta and something awful and, you know, NetArt and 4GIFs and You're the Man Now Dog and they take GIF in and she starts making short animations out of viral video clips and not-safer-work webcam footage and the creatures of the forest just love it, right? These are clips that are being looped and pared down to their most essential moments, right? The files are small and there's no DRM. And so all of a sudden nobody has to press play to actually like experience it, right? It's just kind of going out there and it's spreading in ways that videos and large and JPEGs can't. And even if it's not in the mainstream in terms of actual attention, these forums span multiple kingdoms and multiple languages so much so that GIF is actually pretty damn huge again in terms of volume. And most importantly to GIF, it's useful. And so this is where I get really non-canonical with the whole Snow White story, right? This isn't the Disney take on it. This isn't the grim take on it. There isn't like a whole thing where all of a sudden nobody's gonna die and nobody's gonna be like a winning symbol of the patriarchy and there's no like weird sort of like fetishization of like dead women and coffins and everything else. And in the meantime, yes, Queen Flash, like yes, she wants to rule, but you know, she's gonna try to do that through long-term contracts and with games and subscriber video on demand services. And to be honest, she knows that her time is actually kind of coming to an end anyway. So, you know, it kind of doesn't matter because the story isn't about her. So, but GIF, meanwhile, she's a file format who's kind of traveled the world, right? And she's come out on the other side having learned that she wasn't the problem at all because the file format doesn't necessarily have to be catchy. The file format doesn't necessarily have to be have like widespread adoption. It just has to be useful to some people, you know? And that's something we kind of forgot. It's something we see in the shareware, right? That an app doesn't actually have like a million plus users. It just has to be useful to somebody. And that was kind of cool, right? So anyway, you know, she just does what she does and if the woodland creatures like they use GIF, then she's cool. And so, instead of wasting time with poison apples and witch transformations and all that, the Internet forums get to work doing what they do, which is going out and finding interesting content and surfacing it to their communities. And GIF does what she does, which is turning small moments into short loops of visual data. And, you know, that's sort of creating these small, slightly technical and efficient, but like very super interesting loops of moments from television and viral videos and animation and porn and original art. And because they're small, and because people are starting to use them as reactions to the actual content being shared on the forums, you know, it's actually being used in a meaningful way. In fact, there's a point at which it stops being content and people start using GIFs as actual communication with one another. And that's kind of awesome, right? And so, one day, someone is, you know, named Prince Tumblr, he finds it awesome too. So, in this story, by the way, he isn't male and because traditional gender socialization kind of sucks and this is Tumblr after all, so Prince Tumblr is actually femme, Prince Tumblr and he's traveling the forest and he's going through the forest of subcultures and it just happens to be from this hot new kingdom called Tumblr, which is full of fan communities and hipsters and creative types that are super visual and they have the anonymity going and the whole elastic self thing going and you go, ugh. And Tumblr says to GIF, I love your format so much, I want you to be the queen of the Tumblr kingdom. And GIF says to Tumblr, okay, but I've been working hard and you know, my renderings are so much more and so much different from the ornamental stuff you kind of used to see later before, right? Tumblr says, my kingdom knows that already because it turns out, like what actually happens in real life, the users who are actually on Tumblr are actually on these other forums, they're actually out there in the forest in these other places and they're learning from all of this, right? And they're learning from the forums and the net art makers and everyone else who's actually experimenting with the forum and they realize that they can actually take it and use it in this new space because they get it. They were there all along. And they're out there and they're making art gifts and really high-risk, fancy fashion GIF things that barely move and people love that crap and they're making a sharing GIF set and they sort of teach you things like how to do a proper whatever that thing is and how key works or how to shoot a great jump shot and these are all things that we can understand better because of the loop, because of the repetition, because of the things that GIF creates. And of course, again, porn explodes and not just professional porn, but people having sex at home. And these two GIFs on the right are actually from Cindy users who are on Tumblr and also on Cindy Gallup site. So I don't know if Cindy's around, but I wanna see more of these. Well, I wanna see more people over on Tumblr actually like turning this stuff into GIFs and getting people to actually come back over. It's amazing, right? And most importantly for our favorite file format, there are two features of Tumblr that come in really, really handy. First one is that you can upload entire photo sets into a single post, right? So you can actually do really interesting things with the way that you lay out the images. The other thing is that the heart of Tumblr is this reblog, right? Which is more than a retweet and it's more than a share because it allows you to add your own text, right? And your own images. And when you actually reblog it, the things you have to say don't get sort of pushed down to the bottom of a comment thread, it's kind of what's important, right? And so when somebody reblogs your stuff, you can actually see what they've said and actually have a conversation with them about it in really meaningful way and that's kind of awesome. So if someone were to watch the Disney movies Snow White, they may love it so much that they actually wanna share it with their followers and create their own GIF set and she gives a bunch of tags and people see it and it gets reblogged and maybe with commentary and people talk about how much it means to them and somewhere down that line of reblogs, someone might decide to save this one GIF to their hard drive and perhaps they rename it like happy.gif and then one day she comes across posts about a topic that has nothing to do with the movie but her reaction to it contains this emotion, one that's actually perfectly illustrated by this GIF so she posts that and then other people find her reaction GIF and that sort of branch of the reblog tree, if you think of like everyone reblogging as sort of like a thing that goes like this, it's really long. So lots of other people see this, right? And so they take it and so they decide that they're gonna actually use it as a reaction GIF as well, right? And so you see it showing up lots more places and then somebody actually gets really creative and they decide I'm gonna actually take it and make my own derivative of it, right? Even if you haven't seen the movie, you know what this means. And if you've seen this GIF, this has even more context to it, which is awesome. And you know that Tumblr is working well when Malmo picks up on it, right? And starts using it and starts using the reaction GIF as a form of communication, right? As a form of sharing moments that we all look at and you laugh and like, right? And so GIF becomes a queen of Tumblr and the forums make her a duchess because she can be everywhere at once and because she's everywhere at once, the other kingdoms of the mainstream internet start paying attention to what GIF is doing and they realize that this is a file format that they've shunned for so long, but it's actually really useful and they start realizing that GIF loops aren't annoying, they can actually be illustrative and instructional and everything else and so you start seeing it show up in news and sports blogs and everywhere else and all this happens not because of a huge investment or because somebody thought that GIF was the future or because or any of these reasons, it happens because there's a community of people who are looking to optimize what they do online, right? And when people do that, they get together and they try to find ways around things and you know, IP issues aside, they've figured this out in a really meaningful way and you know, this is content that spreads in ways that you can't control, fastener you can control it and that is kind of awesome, right? So this is the story about how users came in to embrace a 30 year old file format and turn it into something brand new again and create new forms of expression that they didn't have before and that is fucking awesome. Thank you. One minute over.