Editor's Note: To clarify, Giphy is using is not a GIF file format for its looping videos, despite the company's initial insistence that it was. Read our follow-up story here.

The web's favorite animation form returned to Facebook on Thursday, thanks to GIF search engine Giphy.

Facebook supported GIFs in "the early days," Giphy co-founder Alex Chung tells Mashable, but stopped supporting them presumably because "they didn't want to look like a MySpace mess with all the blinking garbage on profile pages."

Since then, the GIF has evolved from what Chung describes as "lame clip art" to "an art form." Facebook doesn't currently support GIFs. Giphy's workaround is a native embed solution such that GIFs will animate full-size in the timeline on click. "To our knowledge, no one has previously offered this functionality," a Giphy rep says.

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Will GIFs overtake Facebook the way they have Tumblr? Probably not to as a great of a degree. The embed format isn't optimal: GIFs don't autoplay, so they function more like short videos. They do run in a continual loop, though.

Gap has partnered with Giphy to ensure that it's the first brand to post a GIF to Facebook, which went up around 11 a.m. ET Thursday:

Post by Gap.

Image: iStockphoto, ktsimage