Yahoo Finance YouTube is playing around with video thumbnails that move like GIFs
Did I just see something move?
Tooling around YouTube — for work purposes, I'm sure — I noticed a little flash of motion in the right-hand column, that vertical stack of thumbnail images from the "up next" videos that the algorithm chooses for us.
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A few minutes later, as I went scrolling through the column, and ... it happened again! The "up next" videos' display images moved in short loops — just like a GIF.
It only happens when you mouse over the thumbnails, but it definitely happens:
Apparently, not everyone's seeing it yet — right now this tiny tweak to the interface is just an experiment that's only out to a few select users.
We asked YouTube what the deal was, and they played it coy:
"With more videos coming to YouTube every minute we're always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them," YouTube said in a statement. "We'll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments."
Our feedback, for the record: Cool! Go for it.
