Popular photo app Instagram does many things really well, but one thing it does not handle is the ability to upload and share videos. Enter Cinemagram, a social networking app for sharing short videos that are actually made into animated GIFs. It includes Instagram-like features such as the ability to add filters to your videos, but the twist with Cinemagram is that each video can be edited so that only a portion of the frame is animated and the rest is in form of a still shot. The effects can be hilarious.

The app is fairly new and was initially $1.99 in Appstore, but it is currently free. It is too soon to tell if this app will become successful, but one thing I noticed immediately is that creative uploads have the possibility to get a lot of attention. I had only just downloaded the app and had almost no followers, still my third video has got almost 500 likes during the first 24 hours since upload. You can see it below. The quality is quite poor but it looks a lot better on the iPhone.

One of the reasons that content may “go viral” within the app is that each time you “like” a video, it is re-posted by you in the app, sort of like a retweet on Twitter, so the content gets a lot of exposure. On top of that the videos with the most likes are displayed in one of the tabs in the app.

Cinemagram doesn’t have a very good web presence, but if you manage to find your profile page and/or the page of one of your animated images, you can find the embed code so that you can paste it easily to your blog for example. The page for the image above is: http://cinemagr.am/showSingle/3502979 and my “profile page” is here: http://cinemagr.am/web/user/827705

Check out and download Cinemagram here.