Why Facebook just paid $400m for GIFs

this video was sponsored by Skillshare I will have a link for you to try them out for free so hang out until the end of the video I think Facebook has just made their most brilliant acquisition since Instagram and whatsapp they just bought a company called gif II just the market leader in gifts for about 400 million US dollars well that doesn't sound all that crazy at first I actually think it is the perfect Trojan horse that left them infiltrate almost all of their competitors at once and the one that left them track you even in places where they couldn't track you before so in the 65th episode of the story behind series let's talk about gifts so gif he is a search engine for gifts and if you like using these little looping videos to express yourself you most likely already use their service because it comes built into almost every social media or messaging platform an even mobile keyboard in the world insert a gif on Twitter and you're most likely see by a gif you right under it use signal and you will find a message say powered by gif yet the bottom type slash gif he into slack and you'll see gifs starting to pop up open the mobile keyboard like my daily driver flexi and there it is gif e everywhere in fact you see that the top gifts that my keyboard recommends to me are the exact same ones that my messaging app suggests to me as well because they all literally use the exact same list coming from giffy and just display it a little differently which makes sense none of these app makers want to compile their own huge libraries of gifts and deal with hosting and copywriting issues when they can just plug an external service like giffy into their apps instead same as they just plug in Google Maps instead of building their own mapping solution or stripe instead of building their own payment infrastructure using external services like these is a standard practice that almost everybody does and it isn't something we typically worry about too much but with giving it's a little different C giffy like most successful search engines doesn't really have many competitors in fact the only strong global competitor is a tenner which recently got acquired by Google Givi was kind of the independent option for a while but with the Facebook acquisition that in and that option is now gone and all the social media and messaging apps that are the primary users of gifts practically have to pick one of their direct competitors as their gift suppliers who they have to integrate into their platform the developers have a choice for how they integrate giffy into their apps and their choice really impacts how much of the danger this Trojan horse is to them but also to you the user and they can currently pick between two options the giffy sdk board the giffy api without getting too technical here the sdk is kind of the automated solution it's a software package a developer can essentially drag and drop into their app to automatically get a standard interface showing gifts animated text stickers and emojis as well as analytics showing them how users engage with those items the KIFI sdk then smartly resizes these gifts to optimize for bandwidth and screen size and more and it's all automatically in this little black box known as the sdk that can even auto update to bring new features as they get released without the developer having to do almost anything now the other option and kind of the opposite of the sdk is the api which you can think of as the sort of manual method here the developer doesn't just drop a black box of prepackaged software into the app but instead simply asks Givi for gifts whenever it needs them and then does everything else manually the developer builds and maintains the user interface for showing and searching through gifts they manage resizing they handle analytics if they want a name and so on in other words they can either let giffy do it all for them using their SDK or they can build their own custom manual integration using the API and which one they choose and how they actually end up implementing all of these features really matters a lot siegy fee would obviously prefer if developers picked the SDK go to developer giffy kong and its pass TK sdk masticate oh and by the way they have the API to but open the documentation for the API and there's your friendly reminder again maybe you should just use the SDK instead why because the SDK gives them control they can choose how their gifts get displayed which left them ad sponsored gifts they get to track the you including seeing their device ID and they get to push update and alter the experience pretty much however they see fit now of course the app maker still has some level of control over the integration if they pay enough attention but the SDK is basically a back door for giffy and thereby for facebook music an api is more work but also more secure as an app maker like signal for example can simply make sure that they don't send any user data with the requests for gifts so with the proper security measures in place all gif you can see is anonymized search request even what the api facebook still gets a glimpse at what people in general are talking about on competing platforms and they can see usage data so for example if a competitor spikes in popularity facebook can see that in real time and respond accordingly but at the very least they don't get accurate user specific data so at this point I wanted to find a list that told me all of the apps that use giffy and actually said which of them use which approach but sadly I couldn't find such a list and all the apps that have actually come forward about their integration as expected are the ones that use the private approach that would be signal and telegram both of which are expected as they are privacy focused messengers slack which again makes sense given that they are a work tool and flexi whose CEO olivier give me a confirmation directly flexi is my keyboard of choice in large part because of their focus on privacy so again that makes sense but interestingly oliviere did tell me that if he tried to upsell them on the sdk which they rejected us apparently and i'm quoting here it's slow and they could update it without us knowing it's like a black box now the companies that have been strangely silent about the steel have been Facebook's biggest competitors like Twitter Tech Talk and snapchat none of which have commented on the matter despite all of them using giffy my guess is that their silence is due to one of two reasons one either their integration with KIFI isn't all that private and they just don't want to talk about it or two they actually plan to remove giffy at some point it's just a lot of work and they can't really make that statement yet either way it should be all of them are furious about Facebook being able to track even just their traffic members and gaining the ability to inject sponsored gives into their platforms and that's just the present imagine all the nasty things Facebook could do in the future with the acquisition they could try to hurt competing social media platforms by cutting them off giffy completely or filling their gift feeds full of sponsored gifts while keeping their own feeds on Instagram and whatsapp clean or they get to stop letting competitors access giffy through the API and make the SDK mandatory or they could try to use the analytics they get from the SDKs to spy on you and try to connect your Twitter snapchat and other IDs to your Facebook profile or I mean a million other things could happen but I think you get the point these app makers and their users they're actually quite hooked on Givi and they aren't any good substitutes which gives giffy and thereby Facebook a whole lot of power that if they wanted to they could actually abuse Facebook has specifically claimed that they didn't by a fee for the data and they would continue support of other platforms you know they made similar statements when they bought Instagram as well as what's up and they totally did break those promises so the amount of trust I would give to these promises is zero as an absolutely norm so instead of Facebook simply avoiding to do nasty stuff out of the kindness of their heart I would rather expect regulators trying to jump in to stop the deal on the grounds of antitrust or the industry coming together and putting their resources behind the development of an alternative gift supplier so they can cut those two out there apps completely now givius just one of the thousands of companies in the so called API economy which app makers around the world including me with my own app crowd youth to make their apps work I've already mentioned Google Maps and stripe before but developers can also simply ping them MailChimp API to send emails or the Yelp API to get restaurant reviews or various Google API is to get advanced machine learning capabilities in their apps just to name a few understanding how api's work is simply a requirement for understanding how the modern web functions and a good place to start learning about them is this fantastic beginners course on Skillshare it walks you through what api's are and how to use them including teaching you concrete examples like using the various Facebook api's or the Twilio API to send SMS messages using just simple code the course is really fun and easy to follow but if api's are not quite your jam skill sure has a ton of other great courses too I have just stumbled upon programmatic graphics which shows you how to create beautiful art and graphics using just code plus their courses and almost anything from graphic design photography and music production and more the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description will get to 2 months of Skillshare premium for free so click that link sign up and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 112,410

Rating: 4.9553323 out of 5

Keywords: Giphy, Facebook, trojan horse, acquisition, TSB, the story behind, GIF, GIFs, acquire, buy, social media, Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Tenor, Google

Id: FfM7tzskcwQ

Length: 9min 34sec (574 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020