Yesterday, a new Chrome extension came out. It has a humble, useful purpose: It organizes your GIFs.
Here's how it works. Right-click a GIF. Send it to your GIFme, which is a little window that hangs down from the toolbar of your browser. Type in three or four tags. Behold it in its catalogued glory--
--then, deploy it, exactly, perfectly, at the right time in a conversation. Your correspondent has now been startled, flummoxed, assailed by your expert GIF.
I find GIFme charming, because it's one of a few tools that have recently sprung up around the archiving and maintenance of one's GIFs. GIFs traffic in novelty: To surprise or delight with a GIF, you need a large lexicon of them. You need, in short, all the standard tools of knowledge creation: a well-kept personal collection; a larger archive, open to anybody; a method of combining and remixing.
If GIFme helps you make a personal GIF collection, Giphy is the larger archive. It's a GIF search engine of sorts from Betaworks, and it launched this February to, uh, tepid reviews. Giphy seems to show that making a pure GIF search engine is hard, perhaps because GIFs, in their current, reactive usage, don't travel with much context. So, now, Giphy is a kind of GIF portal. There's still a big search box at the top, still, but there's also a place to get artistic GIFs and emotionally-coded GIFs and, crucially, timely GIFs, from, say, Doctor Who or Breaking Bad).
