I get asked this question so often that I thought I would post a quick response here that answers that question.

I know you will see any number of animated avatars on twitter profiles and your response may be favorable or negative.

I’m sorry to say that the days of being able to upload an animated avatar are over.

Twitter NO LONGER will allow animated avatars to be uploaded.  In fact they will not allow GIFs to be uploaded at all.

On January 29th, 2009 - an API engineer from Twitter posted this email on the Twitter API Google Group announcing Twitter’s plans to BAN Gif Images.

“Hi all,

I’m sorry for the late notice but I just got word from our User
Experience (UX) group that they are testing a change to stop accepting
GIF images for the avatar (profile_image) and profile wallpaper
(profile_background_image).  For every image we have to verify the
format and size, and then create the thumbnail version. GIF images
consistently fail at that and report ‘possibly too large’ because we
can’t tell what went wrong.
There is no plan to remove existing GIF images. You’ll still be
able to use JPEG (image/jpeg and image/jpg) and PNG (image/png)
images, but new GIF images will no longer be accepted. This code
should be ready within the next week, so if your code is automatically
dealing with images you may want to start disallowing GIFs. Again, I’m
sorry for the late notice on this … snuck up on me as well. ”

Thanks;
— Matt Sanford / @mzsanford

So, If you have an animated avatar, you can keep it - other than that you are out of luck!

Sorry!

PS:  If you have figured out a way to upload a GIF image in the form of an Animated Avatar, please let us know.

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