Zoom, the Lockdown, and the Last Mass GIF Moment

APR 15 2020 · 12:00

Work-from-home Zoom call animation from GIPHY Cares, 2020. By April Zoom carried 300M daily participants and shipped GIF integration in chat by default. Place: Zoom Video Communications, San Jose · locked-down households worldwide Figures: Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO · approximately 300 million daily meeting participants by April 2020 In December 2019, Zoom reports 10 million daily meeting participants. By the end of March 2020, with most of Europe and North America under stay-at-home orders, the number is 200 million. By April it is 300 million. The product becomes, briefly, the social fabric of the white-collar pandemic — the platform on which weddings, funerals, classrooms, AA meetings, and birthday parties happen. Zoom's chat layer ships with GIPHY integration (see [[giphy-founded-2013]]) baked in by default. The animated-emoji reaction layer follows in 2020-2021. For approximately twelve months, the GIF gets a final mass-use case it had not previously occupied: the lubricant of the work-from-home video call, where typing nodding into the chat surfaces the standard Tina-Fey-thumbs-up loop and lets a meeting move on.