Facebook may not have answered the Internet's screams for GIFs on their site just yet, but GIF search engine Giphy has at least manufactured a workaround.
Rejoice!
In a post on their blog today, Giphy announced how you can embed different GIFs from their site on Facebook and have them loop over and over on your Facebook timeline.
One way to do so is to post the link of the GIF's page to your Facebook. Another way is to use the Facebook share button on that same page.
There are two catches however. People looking at your post will need to press play on the GIF to get it going. But once play is pressed, the GIF will loop forever and ever, just as it should. The other is that people on Facebook will only be able to GIF up their newsfeed with GIFs from Giphy, not other websites.
It appears the news has slowed down Giphy and even caused some downtime for the site, though it appears to be working at the time of writing.
So go on. Get your GIF on.
UPDATE, 2:18 p.m: In an email to the Huffington Post a Facebook spokesperson wrote that “Facebook does not support animated GIFs," confirming that this is a workaround constructed by Giphy.
UPDATE 3:03 p.m.: Over at Mashable, Lance Ulanoff thickens the plot. A right click on the "GIFs" shared from Giphy to Facebook reveal that users are actually sharing a Flash file converted from a GIF. Though these Flash files are behaving like GIFs, native animated GIFs are still not on Facebook and it's unclear if they ever will be.