Enter the GIFBattle.zone!, by Paul Ford (Ftrain)

Jan 26, 2016 · Article · Postlight Insights

Enter the GIFBattle.zone!

Two months ago the engineers, designers, and product managers at Postlight (our web-and-app agency in NYC) had a conversation about how the best part of ...

Enter the GIFBattle.zone!

Introducing GIFBattle.zone, a new Postlight experiment

Two months ago the engineers, designers, and product managers at Postlight (our web-and-app agency in NYC) had a conversation about how the best part of chatting online was the animated GIFs (not the boring talk about work). And it made us wonder: “What would conversations be like if they were only animated GIFs?”

So we built a web app to try that out. And that’s how GIFBattle.zone—an, uh, “animated-GIF-first competitive chat battle”—was created.

The rules are simple: Sign in with Twitter, challenge a friend, and then fiercely burn each other using GIFs while you each run down the clock. You can have a cute-animal-off, a nerd-off, challenge Shakira, what-have-you. Strangers can watch, and once you’re done, your friends can vote to determine a winner.

We’re only a few months old and this was our first “experiment” as a company and so we aimed to do something fun and participatory. Lots of people jumped in — you can see who on the About page. A lot of nights and weekends went to make this work.

As a side-effect, we learned how to make a totally decentralized real-time live chat with rich media (which is very, very useful knowledge), using the most modern possible technology stack. Handy! We’ll write more about the technologies involved in a coming post. (There’s no server! It’s built on Firebase. It’s pretty intense.)

But that can wait. Go visit! See it on Product Hunt! Join the 17 people who currently follow @gifbattlezone on Twitter! It’s good times. We hope you like it and we welcome all your feedback.

Postlight is a rapidly-growing product shop in New York City that builds mobile and web apps for our clients and for ourselves. We love the web — the real, messy, global web, plugins and all — way more than is healthy or sane. If we can be of service, get in touch.