Depending on whether you love or hate animated gifs, this will be either excellent or horrible: to turn any YouTube video into an animated gif without having to download anything or mess with any application, substitute the “youtube” in the URL with “gifyoutube“.
For example, I’ll take this video of Felicia Day (creator of The Guild and Geek and Sundry) flying on a trapeze:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIfPZka-8XQ
…and change the URL into this:
www.gifyoutube.com/watch?v=YIfPZka-8XQ
Enter a title for the gif (title is truncated, below), drag the video’s play head to the time where you want the gif to start, then set the number of seconds the gif should run, with a maximum of 10 seconds. Click the Create gif button on bottom, and it instantly creates the gif and gives you a URL that you can use.
The gif I created above has a URL of:
http://share.gifyoutube.com/oQS.gif
(And if you want to see Felicia Day doing a lot of other fun stuff, check out her channel, The Flog.)