When two best friends move across the country from each other after spending all of college living and doing practically everything together, the question often becomes “how will we stay in touch?”
For the ladies who run the increasingly popular Tumblr blog called #Whatshouldwecallme, the answer is graphics interchange format, better known as gifs. Gifs, moving bitmap images, which have become popular on the blogosphere, are short clips of video often used as an alternative to images.
On their blog, the two friends, who have preferred to remain anonymous in this article, use the gifs to illustrate some of life’s most relatable moments and make them laughable, “They’re really all inside jokes,” said the creators via e-mail, “It’s funny that so many people relate and that our sense of humor has put its finger on these things that everyone experiences.”
The creators, now both 24-year-old law students, one in California and the other in Washington D.C., originally created the blog back in February of this year as a way to stay in touch.
“We Gchat several times a day and we’d send these little gifs back and forth to each other. Instead of explaining how we were feeling, we’d send a link, and it was just hilarious to us. The Tumblr started on a whim one day as another way to stay in touch,” said the Californian creator.
Now, with the site in its 13th week, it has gained over 50,000 followers on Tumblr and while Tumblr doesn’t release specific numbers for their user’s blogs, independent traffic trackers put their traffic between one to two million page views a day.
“I think within the first week we had 500 followers and then by the next week we were at 15,000. So it really happened in the first two weeks, and then all of a sudden we saw a surge,” said the creator now living in Washington D.C.
The two explained that they never intended to have the blog become public, “Both of us had it up as our Gchat statuses, that was the only way we imagined anyone finding out about it. But that really goes to show how fast things can spread online,” continued the D.C. creator.
Morgan Peck, a sophomore, said she discovered the blog through Facebook, “I saw these gifs being posted onto my peers’ walls and decided to check it out. It’s a huge time suck because they’re so funny. I couldn’t stop looking,” said Peck.
The sensation has become particularly popular on college campuses due to the fact that the creators and college students fall roughly into the same age group, making the gifs relatable for college students and the things they typically experience. The two have even agreed that they feel they have “tapped into some popular subconscious of young women.”
In a survey conducted earlier this week, fifty Fairfield University students were asked if they have heard of #Whatshouldwecallme over the past few weeks and 77 percent answered yes.
“I think the reason #Whatshouldwecallme is so funny is because it really is so relatable to what we as college students are going through. It’s so real. It’s everything you want to say out loud, but don’t,” said Adrianna DiNapoli ’14.
#Whatshouldwecallme has gained so much attention and admiration in its short existence that others have begun to follow the trend by creating blogs in hopes that they can be “half as funny” as the original.
One hopeful called How Do I Put This Gently? was created just earlier this month. Its creator is also a graduate student and says loves #Whatshouldwecallme. Her posts are similar to #Whatshouldwecallme’s, as they focus on common issues amongst twenty-something’s turned funny.
So what’s next for the ladies of #Whatshouldwecallme? Well they say don’t want to take the blog too seriously just yet.
When asked if they have any plans for taking the next step to earn money off of their inside jokes, the D.C. creator responded, “Not really. We write these things and just hope that the other laughs. That’s still our main goal: is my best friend going to think this is hysterical?”
courtney todd 