This is excellent. I've been dealing with weather radar images lately, and they're all terrible animated gifs. This sizes them down nicely.
A service like this really needs to support oEmbed. The oEmbed spec is pretty simple and it would make this more widely usable by popular blogging platforms, and make it easier to use on responsive websites. http://oembed.com/
> I've been dealing with weather radar images lately, and they're all terrible animated gifs
actually, weather radar is an ideal use-case for GIFs. they have limited colors, only a few dozen frames which may need to be delayed for a few hundred ms.
you should really try compressing the gifs using something like gifsicle [1], you'll be astounded by the resulting size (use lzw compression), quality and performance (use a global color palette). it will surpass any video you can make.
what GIFs are terrible at is photographs and video. for the majority of graphics and animations they're awesome sauce.
You're correct: Radar is pretty well suited for a gif. But, it can still lead to 400kb images that are 150kb when h.264 video. For a mobile connection, that's worth caring about.
As someone who's messed around with gifs a fair amount, I recommend using Imagrmagik over gifscicle since Imagemagik offers far more features and can do a much wider variety of compression on gifs.
A service like this really needs to support oEmbed. The oEmbed spec is pretty simple and it would make this more widely usable by popular blogging platforms, and make it easier to use on responsive websites. http://oembed.com/