Drop TV and movie clips into your Slack chats with Yarn

Giphy’s Slack integration is one of the most fun ways of communicating online, period. Instead of saying ‘good morning’ to the TNW team, I say ‘/giphy good morning’ and a suitable GIF is displayed. But what if you could could use video clips from TV shows and movies instead?

Yarn launched late last year as a kind of ‘Giphy for TV and movie clips.’ Say you search for the word ‘test’ it might bring back a clip from Ghostbusters featuring the line “Successful test.” After launching on the Web and as a Facebook Messenger add-on, now it’s come to Slack.

It works exactly as you’d expect… to a point. I typed ‘/yarn wow’ into Slack, and it brought back a clip of Jim Carrey as The Grinch saying ‘Wow.’

The only problem is that you have to click a link off to Yarn’s website to watch the clip. That means it lacks the immediacy of a GIF, which plays inline within Slack.

Yarn is a startup focused on searching within videos. Its first products are fun consumer showcases of the technology but it’s easy to see how the approach could be expanded to professional use.

For now, TV and film obsessives have a new toy to try in their favorite Slack community.

➤ Yarn for Slack