A new web called GIFDeck helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop.

Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion.

While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message - just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window - and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client.

Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any browser or email client. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support animated GIFs yet.

Internally, the GIF Deck app uses the GIF.js library to convert the individual deck images into a GIF image. The library supports all modern web browsers and it does the conversion in the client’s browser.

The only downside is that the generated GIF images aren’t optimized so if you are trying to convert an image-heavy presentation into a GIF, the image file could easily run into a few megabytes. The app’s source code can be found on Github.