Whatever GIF: Whatever you do, do it Well

“GIF” or “Jif”? This is the “tomato, tomahto” of our generation; no matter how the word is pronounced, we know GIFs are here to stay. Fortunately, people, these days are less concerned with grammar than the image itself. The popular file format used by millennials has recently become the standard web humor tool alongside viral memes and videos. They are so widespread that the word “GIF” was named the Oxford dictionary word of the year 2012.

What are GIFs

A Graphical Interchange Format (GIF) is an image format invented in 1987 by Steve Wilhite, an American software writer. He was looking for a way to animate images in the smallest file size. In short, GIFs are a sequence of photos or videos with no sound that repeat themselves continuously and that don’t require anyone to press the play button. This repetition makes the GIFs feel instantly familiar, like the beat of a song.

Why Google Bought Tenor

As mentioned above, Tenor has already amassed an impressive audience reach. For comparison: Twitter reported 330 million active users per month in the fourth quarter of 2017, roughly the same as Tenor. Tenor’s main competitors in the GIF search engine sector include GIPHY with 300 million active users per day and Gfycat with around 130 million active users per month.

GIFs are becoming more attractive and famous because, like memes, they are useful for communicating jokes, emotions, and ideas. Sites like GIPHY and Gyfcat also make it easy to share and create GIFs. These services are built into applications like Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and your phone’s keypad, making them as easy to use as emojis or “stickers.”

Whatever you do, do it well

I remember a Latin phrase we learned in elementary school: “age quod agis”. The literal translation is “do what you do”, but essentially it means “whatever you do, do it well”; Whatever you do, do it with your whole being.

When we do what we do with our whole being, it means working from our core, heart and soul, not just from above. Applying this to our work means nothing airy: fairy, new age, religious or subversive. However, this means that we take a deeper approach to the work, which could be called the spiritual approach.