What is mgcl.co? Who are you people? Why did someone send me a link to you?

Hi! Sorry about the confusion, let's try to clear up why you ended up here.

We're a small company based in San Francisco that provides GIF creation and referral programs to app developers, making it easier for them to create GIFs with highly viral content, and let players easily share this content from the game. mgcl.co is a hard-to-pronouce and fairly opaque abbreviation of our company's name, Megacool. Yeah, we know, it's suboptimal, we're trying to come up with something better, but naming things is hard! Let us know if you think of something.

As part of the referral program we create links on mgcl.co that will redirect you to the game in question if you have it installed, or to an app store where you can download the game. One of your friends apparently wants you to come play some games with them!

What is this weird code in the URL?

Glad you're asking! The code is there as part of our referral program, enabling the game to give the person who sent you the link a reward if you end up installing the game. Maybe you get a reward as well, it's really up to the game developers how they want to use this feature. The code looks something like _m=12345678a1, and is composed of three parts; the _m is just a hopefully unique key we attach that probably won't collide with any other keys the game developers might use. The first eight characters on the other side of the equals sign identify who created the link, and the remainder identifies a GIF that's attached to the share. The latter enables us to show a preview of the game with the GIF when the link is shared to services which preview links.

Isn't that tracking? What do you with my data?

Depending on your phone, yes it is. On iOS (Apple devices) this feature relies on tracking link clicks to see which ones end up as an install, since Apple doesn't provide a feature to send any metadata through the app store on referrals. The Google Play Store on Android enables this, which means we don't have to store any data about link clicks, but can simply redirect you to the app store with no further ado. On iOS-devices figuring out which link you clicked on before installing the app is a bit more complicated, which means we have to store your IP address, which browser you used when clicking the link, and the time you did so, to provide this service. Note that we DO NOT sell or provide access to this data to any other parties, and that it's not stored indefinitely, but deleted as soon as it's safe for us to do so.

I got more questions

We'd be glad to answer some! If you're a game developer who'd like to try out the product, sign up here!

If you just have some general inquiries about the service, shoot an email to hel[email protected].

If you happen to be a developer who thinks animated GIFs are the best thing since sliced bread, we're hiring!