New Insight: Gallery of all the gifs the user posts/faves/retweets over time

[adampash]

One-liner

Gallery of all the gifs the user posts/faves/retweets over time.

Full explainer

The animated gif hold a special place in the heart of internet culture. This insight creates a gallery of the gifs the user has in some way liked. It should make the user feel awesome because gifs generally do that.

Audience for the insight

This insight is primarily good for Twitter — particularly now that twitter supports gif embeds (sort of). We could try with Facebook, but 1) they don't support gifs and 2) my gut says gifs are more of a Twitter thing anyway.

It serves users with more activity — but that activity is varied (could be faves, retweets, or posts).

How often this insight runs

• One-time only, if it's never appeared before
• First crawl only
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Triggered by a data event

Insight should run monthly, ideally on a Friday. Maybe something like the third Friday of every month.

Then it would be great to have an end-of-year gallery of gifs, though end-of-year timing TBD.

Headline

• tGIF!

Body

• Happy Friday! Here are %total gifs %username tweeted, faved, or retweeted this month:
• %username shared or faved %total gifs this month. Behold:
• It's pronounced "gif", as in "OMG look at these %total gifs %username liked this month:"

Criteria and logic

This insight needs all of the users posts, faves, and retweets for the month. Then we're looking for links to gifs — whether they're outbound links or pic.twitter links. I don't know, API-wise, if we can tell if pic.twitter is a gif or isn't, but hopefully we can! The new twitter gif support could also potentially pose a challenge since the gifs are actually converted to mp4 — so I'm not sure if there's a proper gif remaining or not.

Minimum threshold should be > 1 gif.

Included elements

• Headline
• Text
• Header image (image off to the left in side-by-side style insights)
• Hero image (giant image on top)
• List of user(s)
• List of post(s)
• List of link(s)
• Action button
• Line chart
• Bar chart
• Other viz
• Other graphic treatment

If we can do this, a list of images would be great. Might be good to make them all the same width, or just width="100%". Would look better, and gifs are rarely high fidelity anyway.

[cdmoyer]

So, digging in to animated GIFs on twitter.

Anil posted this one a while back: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/484525822967955456/photo/1
The first sad finding, in our database (using the updated crawler which looks at media entities in the twitter API and handles photos), we have this for that post:

url= http://t.co/bFdvlwZCKn
expanded_url=https://twitter.com/anildash/status/484525822967955456/photo/1
image_src=NULL

Which basically means that we didn't detect an image in that tweet.

So I posted this: https://twitter.com/CDMoyer/status/484738961214959616/photo/1
and then grabbed my own user_timeline.json and found this:

  "entities": {
      "hashtags": [],
      "symbols": [],
      "urls": [
        {
          "url": "http://t.co/7OwcOcToqH",
          "expanded_url": "http://twitter.com/CDMoyer/status/484738961214959616/photo/1",
          "display_url": "pic.twitter.com/7OwcOcToqH",
          "indices": [
            94,
            116
          ]
        }
      ],

So basically, twitter is tweeting animated gifs as obfuscated links and only displaying them on twitter.com, not providing a URL to display the media.

... I don't think we can do this insight (yet). ;(

[adampash]

Awww, that is brutal. 💔

This wouldn't catch gifs that people upload directly to Twitter, but we could still look for links that end in .gif and try to collect those. I would have actually wanted to try doing that anyway, but was hoping we'd be able to aim for both. The gifs-on-Twitter limitation is unfortunate.

So what do you think @cdmoyer / @anildash? Is it at all worth trying that limited version? I do think people are still more apt to post gifs as click-out links than uploading them, since it's still kind of a hassle to upload them. Maybe worth still testing how often an http://......gif search matches up. I may be biased, but I swear I fave a lot of .gif links.