Are animated GIFs going to be an ongoing presence in media coverage, or is their current popularity just a passing fad?

I was interested in that @digg tweet today. MIDI! It’s the future.

Oh, I hadn't seen that! PLUS ONE. twitter.com

Nice embedded tweet, Branch!

Can it embed a story? (It can, I think.)

Yes! And I do wonder whether the current excitement about GIFs can be maintained -- or whether we're reading PEAK GIF. :)

Do you think GIFs could just wind up being another tool? Storify: at first, it was super exciting (we’ll tell HISTORY through it!), then it became way overused (42 Storifies That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity), and now it’s sometimes quite well used (and *very* effective then) but mostly a groaner.

Color me skeptical, but I find it hard to see how MIDI could fly as a medium for information. Music is fun, but how do you make a snark with sounds?

Yes! Though MIDI has its retro-ness going for it. It seems like GIFs' charm are the fact that they're so charmingly retrograde. Once they're trendy -- ie, NOW -- they might lose some of that charm.

I think there are some forms of data which might be *best* presented as sound! And you could snark with it, because we already snark with video — check out how @TheAtlanticTech snarked @digiphile today. That wasn’t MIDI-able, but it *would* have worked if it was sound-only.

(I really think the main thing limiting a Dance Dance MIDIlution is… bandwidth.)

The real breakthrough will be when we figure out how to combine music AND GIFs.

I WANT MY MGV

YES. That would be absolutely amazing.

Rob, @digiphile saw that and raised! twitter.com

I saw! But I, alas, don’t control @AlexisMadrigal on FB.

There must be some back-door vulnerability we can hack into...

We are so early in on the ground floor of Branch, I wonder if we can accomplish some firsts.

First lie on Branch: I have potatoes growing out of my ears!

First mixed metaphor: On the Internet, we wrap ourselves in an echo chamber of silence.

First Atlantic headline with an emoticon: Here It Comes: Super Gonorrhea :-/

GIFs: Definitely a fad. They're totally useful, but the OMGZ flavor of it all makes me think people don't understand *why* they're useful.

MIDI: Did you know digital wind controllers are a thing? They are geeky and awesome.

Hacking Madrigal's FB: Let's brute force it. It definitely has to do with mustaches, so we can start from there.

(P.S. I'm not late, I'm fashionable.)

(P.P.S. First post-scripts on Branch!)