GIF platform Tenor has announced that it will be powering GIF searches within LinkedIn Messaging, as reported by TechCrunch. The news comes just a couple weeks after Google announced it had acquired Tenor to help the company bring up GIFs inside Google images and other services like Gboard more easily.
As part of the new integration, members will be able to search for GIFs within LinkedIn Messaging as well as access trending GIFs, and in the near future have a custom stream thats shows what’s being used most often within LinkedIn. The update is now available for 50 percent of LinkedIn users, and will be rolling out to everyone else in the near future.
Tenor says that messages sent on LinkedIn have grown 60 percent in the past year, and that integrating GIFs on the platform will help “to create genuine connections with professional contacts such as coworkers, past colleagues or fellow alumni.” Sure, more people are sending messages on LinkedIn, and using GIFs within messaging in general has become much more popular... but is it necessary to be able to send GIFs to your colleague, recruiter, or potential candidate for a job? Is a GIF from “The Hangover” an appropriate response to agreeing to meet a superior, as illustrated by Tenor above? Was Tenor so preoccupied with whether or not it could, it didn’t stop to think if it should?
If you have feelings about adding a dash of Chuck Norris or a minion to your LinkedIn messages, the Tenor GIF search should be accessible via a GIF button in the message compose field (if you’re part of the 50 percent that currently has it).