This article was published on September 13, 2016

Meet Guggy, your new favorite GIF tool


Meet Guggy, your new favorite GIF tool

At TNW, we’re nuts about Giphy in our Slack channels. The randomness of it all adds to the humor, but it’s often horrifically wrong, which then forces you to explain yourself out of awkward situations. Guggy is like Giphy, but with additional context so you won’t want to crawl in a hole and die.

Case in point, I once typed “sucker” when referring to a naive colleague. I got smacked right in the face with this:

… true story. It seems Giphy and I have a fundamental difference of opinion when it comes to determining what certain words mean. This happened just days after I was hired at TNW.

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It was…

Guggy, in my opinion, is a better solution for providing context, although it’s definitely not perfect. You’re still met with Giphy-esque mishaps in Slack, but its far better at providing context when using the gifs elsewhere. It’s the one solution, in my opinion, that could actually facilitate an entirely gif-based conversation without confusing either party.

It’s also an ideal solution for a quick save after an embarrassing moment.

While Slack is an excellent use case, Guggy is mostly on par with other options there — like Giphy and RightGIF. Where it truly outshines existing tools, however, is nearly everywhere else. Take this Twitter exchange, for example. The additional context allows me to use a rather obscure gif while still getting my point across, something that’s basically impossible without an hours-long search for that perfect gif elsewhere.

A quick search with the Chrome extension, Android keyboard, iOS app (coming soon), or one of two bots (KiK and Telegram) are all you need to provide context to a reply without a drawn out search for a gif that perfectly delivers a message. There’s also an API for developers.

It basically removes all suspicion that the person on the other end of the message could take it out of context.

Gifs might actually take over the world, but as it turns out, they’re still better with a touch of context.

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