Some make great forum avatars on the other hand. I remember one that showed a bug crawling around that looked so real that I tried to get it off my monitor the first time I saw it.

Anyway, if you are into animated gifs you might like Gickr.com which offers a service to convert Youtube videos into animated gifs. All online with minimal user input. I have created one from videos that I found at Youtube, you see it below.

The user can make a few decisions about the final size and the amount of frames of the animated gif. The size can be 50, 100, 120 and 200 pixels in width and the frames 5, 15, 25 and 45. The conversion takes only a minute or so depending on the video that you want to convert. There is unfortunately no option to select a time period that should be converted.