[chillingeffect]

Hehh heh: Did you only read the stats on loading the page :)

Seriously, the whole entire point of the page is that, yes, GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression!

That's information we can use to make better startups!

Instead of trying to own everything and start from scratch with the most efficient artifacts like file formats, try to leverage from "inferior" techniques in order to allow the user-generated content to flourish!!!! I'm glad someone posted this!

[ardf]

GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression

I suppose I'm being quite negative, but I don't see the logic in that statement. In what way does it allow more freedom? The biggest advantage I think gif has at the moment is familiarity.

[akavi]

The more constrained a medium is, the easier it is for an amateur to make something that's "good enough" to be shared publicly without shame. It's the creative equivalent of a blur filter on glamor shots. And wonderfully, you end up with creative output from people who often wouldn't dare to create otherwise.

See also: Vine, Minecraft, Twitter, Instagram (quite literally) etc.

[Grue3]

Because you can open any GIF in GIMP and edit it. Pixel by pixel. With videos you got what... Cinelerra? Blender? Try to get a normal person to use these.

[tbirdz]

You can dump all the frames from the video to images, edit the images in gimp, and combine the edited frames back together to make a new video.