Please say ‘hi’ to Relay: a messaging app that allows you to communicate entirely in animated GIFs. Why oh why has it taken until 2014 to get to this point when we had GIFs right back at the beginning? Doesn’t matter, probably something to do with mobile phones. Who really cares? All that matters is that it’s here now. The Internet’s finally come good. Quickly - go and download it. Don’t even read the rest of this blog post. It’s shit anyway.

Thank you to the Relay team - we love this app at Made by Many. Practically the whole company is now on it. Productivity has slowed to a glacial creep but at least people are happy. To be honest, the Internet has been full of lots of bad things recently: hacking, scamming, spying, trolling, spamming... thank god something turned up that just makes you f**king laugh outloud again!

Thank god - something to live for again.

I’ve only ****really**** enjoyed the Internet about five times since 1998 (Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and Instagram were the other four), but Relay really is special. And right now, it’s probably the only NSA-proof way of communicating online with your mates. Hey NSA, good luck figuring out what we're saying to each other with aniGIFs!

Of course we’ve been able to embed GIFs into desktop chat clients for very-many-of-your-earth-years already. And we’ve been able to embed GIFs into emails. Yes. But what I witnessed this weekend, having introduced my wife and her friends to Relay (i.e. normal-people-not-Internet-idiots) was the mass appeal of aniGIF-based communication across huge swathes of the mainstream. It’s the future. It can only be a matter of time before Relay is acquired by Facebook, or Facebook create a slightly less good version of it and pretend they didn’t copy it.

Use it now, while you still can.

In one evening, as soon as bedtime was over, Caroline (wife) and two of her friends sent each other 346 aniGIFs over the course of around two hours. It continued at a slightly lower rate all over the weekend. They described it as, “more fun than Instagram”. Relay puts animated GIFs within reach of normal people. And they love it.

And why not? GIFs are particularly useful for communicating emotional reactions, when practically unlimited, always-on and located (like many great weapons) in the palm of your hand. In some ways GIFs are more conversational than words – the meaning of a tiny, looping moving image can be fuzzier and more nuanced.

Somehow, that seems to make it more hilarious.

Maybe GIFs tap into a pre-literal part of our brains. After all, people have been communicating in pictures for hundreds of thousands of years. Writing is only 6,000 years old. Pictograms and ideograms existed as hieroglyphs well before phonetic writing tamed them and created syllables and alphabet languages.

I’d like to use Relay during an MRI scan: since images are processed by the right hemisphere of the brain (in most people) and 95% of right-handed people have left-hemisphere dominance for language, it would be interesting to see if the right side of the brain was lighting up as the brain processed this ‘throwback language’ in a different way.

Check this video below – the world’s first animated GIFs: a selection of 20 animals painted 30,000 years ago by our Upper Paleolithic cousins in France. Now we look at them again, it’s quite clear that the animals we used to think were bison and mammoth are actually huge cats, and some puppies. This cave is a stone-age meme-pool.

There is evidence that early humans would gather in the darkness with candles, take mind-altering drugs and laugh uncontrollably at the new GIFs they were posting up on the walls.

There is evidence that these stone-age GIF-sessions may have played an evolutionary role in our mental development.

Relay is the most exciting thing since Instagram. If you like laughing and fun, and hovering cats, Chuck Norris, movie quotes and trash culture, puppies, waving bears, silly dancing, Star Wars, #epicfails, the Internet and laughing at the absurd pointlessness of life in general… then you’ll love Relay.

I promise...