Imgur just gave itself an early birthday present: One week before the popular image hosting service celebrates its sixth anniversary, it unveiled a web-based video to GIF conversion tool Thursday. The new tool makes it easy to create GIFs from any video clip hosted at YouTube or more than 500 other video sites. Imgur bills the converter as the next step to help its users tell stories - but it's also a bit of a Trojan horse to give Imgur a bigger foothold in mobile.
The new conversion tool is a remarkably simple way to run videos into GIFs: Users just have to paste a video's URL into a form field, select a segment of up to 15 seconds, add an optional caption and then let the Imgur servers do their work. As always with Imgur, users don't have to register, and the result can be freely shared across the...