Giphy has launched a new Stories feature that offers a mix of similarly named functionality from other services by putting an hourly rotation of staff-curated GIFs on the front page of both the site and the app. The feature manifests as two sections on the front page, called “Latest Stories” and “All Stories.” The Latest Stories heading is where you’ll find the latest in news, entertainment, and other areas. At least one of the GIFs here will change each hour. The All Stories heading, meanwhile, contains a day-by-day breakdown that shows the past few days’ worth of curated GIFs. After that, the feed simply switches over to the old “Trending GIFs” order.
Clicking or tapping one of the GIFs shown in the Stories headings will bring you to a page dedicated to that particular Story. There, you’ll see a number of curated GIFs and perhaps a short writeup, depending on the content at hand. In the main photo for this article, for instance, there’s a GIF celebrating Wesley Snipes’ vampire-hunting film Blade turning 20, and if you click that Story, you’ll find a number of Blade GIFs with appropriate text snippets. This goes for not only the most recent Stories but anything under the Stories headings. Clicking on a Trending GIF, meanwhile, will just pull up the full viewing page for that particular GIF.
Stories was rolled out quietly with little fanfare, and no formal announcement from Giphy. Both the main Giphy blog and the company’s engineering blog make no mention of Stories at all, as of this writing. This feature, as its name suggests, is meant to be Giphy’s answer to the Stories feature found in Snapchat and the many clones it inspired across the mobile app sphere. Some variants of this type of feature focus on a single user’s story over time, while others focus on wider trends and news. Giphy obviously decided to go with the latter, aping the implementation seen in Snapchat’s Discover tab. The feature originator and many of its clones do have at least some user focus, but that doesn’t seem to be where Giphy is taking the feature. At present, user pages still feature their latest and most popular GIF uploads.