Flickr has upgraded their “Explore” feature with a panda that vomits rainbows.

more info: “Of Pandas and Rainbows” & “The Secrets of Explore”

via Daring Fireball

Flickr has just added a new fullscreen photo sideshow feature that can be embedded on websites and blogs. The slideshows also have the ablity to include videos.

guest post by Todd Lappin (Telstar Logistics)

What was that big thing? Yesterday? Up in the sky? If you happened to look up sometime around 3 pm, you might have seen it: A twin-deck Airbus A380 superjumbo airliner looping around downtown San Francisco.

The A380 was here as part of a promotional tour by Emirates airlines, and I managed to weasel my way aboard for a celebratory 90-minute flight to nowhere. As we cruised in the skies over Northern California, I snacked on frou-frou canapes and explored the brand-new aircraft.

The first class suites are amazing:

The first-class shower is even more amazing:

Even the economy class seats were relatively roomy, and the onboard entertainment system offered an awful lot of ways to distract yourself. News feeds. On-demand video. The words.

My favorite was the Tailcam, realtime video piped to each passengers’ seat showing the view from the top of the A380’s vertical stabilizer. It’s basically the same view you get in many popular flight sim packages, but it’s more fun when it’s real. Here’s our landing at SFO:

There’s more nerdy technical detail abut the flight in my post over at Telstar Logistics, and the link to more pictures is below:

Telstar Logistics photoset “Emirates A380 at SFO”

photos & images by Telstar Logistics, except for the view from below, which is used courtesy of Brian Kusler

Some people are demanding that Flickr remove videos, others are demanding that Flickr remove photos, but the most important thing that people are demanding from Flickr is Donuts!. Stephen Shankland has more on this movement over at CNET.

If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts! Join the group if you want Flickr to give you free donuts.

“What do we want? Donuts! When do we want them? Now!”

UPDATE: Matthew Rothenberg, who works for Flickr, confirms that they will in fact be providing donuts. At long last the people are getting what they demanded.

While you have not yet reached your goal of 20K members, we at FlickrHQ have heard of your noble efforts and seek to answer your cries for justice.

Save the date: Wednesday, April 16th, 11:00am at a donut shoppe TBD in downtown San Francisco. I will purchase one (1) free donut for every We Demand Donuts group member who shows up.* (*While supplies last.)

This is not a joke.

Let glazed and jelly-filled freedom ring!

(I sincerely apologize for those members who are not local to the SF Bay Area, but the combination of a greasy donut and a postal envelope is a very sad thing indeed, and would be an affront to Donutkind.)

image via Automatt

Flickr has just launched their long anticipated video feature. The announcement came in the form of a puppet show posted by Flickr community manager Heather Champ.

I have been testing out Flickr video for the last couple of weeks and it seems to work pretty well and the embeded player is really nice, but one thing to keep in mind is that the videos are limited to 90 seconds with a max upload size of 150MB.

Here’s a video that I’ve uploaded to Flickr of last weekend at the Saint Stupid’s Day Parade. I shot this video with my new Flip Video Ultra camera and edited in iMovie.

This is the message that Flickr displays while your video is being processed.

UPDATE 1: The Flickr Video launch appears to be a soft launch and is not yet available to the public. The test videos I’ve uploaded are still showing up as private.

UPDATE 2: Ok, Flickr has just announced that Flickr Video is now live. I’ve uploaded another test video “We Have Become Content”.

Here are a few photos from tonight’s Flickr Turns 4 party at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. I shot these with my new Ricoh GR Digital II. I’m still getting used to it, but so far it’s a really great 10-megapixal compact camera that shoots in RAW with excellent manual controls and great low-light performance, not to mention it’s damn sexy. Special thanks to James Home for the inspiration to buy one (he was shooting with his GR II at ETech).

UPDATE: More photos from WHAT IM SEEING dot com and Andrew Mager.

photo by Scott Beale

Flickr is celebrating their 4th birthday with Flickr Turns 4 this Saturday, March 15th from 6-9pm at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. RSVP on Upcoming.

photo by Scott Beale of cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

In response to Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid for Yahoo, many Flickr users are expressing concern for what might happen if Microsoft is successful. They have even created a Flickr Group to address this issue, Microsoft: Keep Your Evil Grubby Hands Off Of Our Flickr, complete with photo pool of MS/Flickr takeover images, including some that envision what a Flickr website re-design might look like with Microsoft at the controls.

image by Michael Seneschal

Flickr is talking like a pirate today on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Go to Flickr, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Arrrr! localization link.

UPDATE: The Flickr forum thread on this is pretty amusing. Some people thought that the Flickr website had been compromised by real internet pirates.

DeskLickr is a great new Mac app that pulls photos from Flickr (yours or other people’s) setting them as your desktop image (wallpaper) which you have it change at preset intervals.

UPDATE: If you are a Microsoft Windows user, check out Flickr Wallpaper Rotator.

via Lifehacker

Our friends over at Flickr have developed a fun new pastime, Faceball. Two people sit 10 feet apart and take turns throwing a beachball at each other’s face. Here’s an instructional video showing how the game is played. More Faceball photos and video.

UPDATE: CBS 5 (KPIX) in San Francisco did a news story the global Faceball craze.

Chris Messina recently turned me on the the new social network Virb. I must say I’m pretty impressed. There are a ton of great features and the design is really nice. It features Flickr integration, VirbTunes (an iTunes plugin) and a beautiful widescreen video player with a nice lightbox effect. A Twitter module is in the works as well.

Virb gives you the ability to easily customize your profile and if you don’t like someone’s customizations, they have a feature that allows you to remove it while viewing their profile. Looking at their blog, they seem to be pretty busy rolling new features and functionality. It will be interesting to see how this service develops over time.

A place that lets you put all of the things that make you you – photos, videos, blogs – in one place. So you can find friends (and friends can find you).

More specifically, VIRB° is our vision of a social community - done right. A website that combines you, your interests, your friends and the things you like with music, art, fashion, film and more. Stay connected with your friends. Find new music. View and upload good videos, photos and more.

Just for kicks, let’s compare Virb to MySpace using the profiles for the band Scissors for Lefty. Here they are on MySpace and now on Virb. Which one would you spend more time on? To quote Derek Powazek “Oh, so that’s what MySpace would be like if they’d ever hired a designer”.

Like Flickr, Vox and Facebook before them, Virb has now raised the bar once more when it comes to social networks. Here’s Laughing Squid’s profile on Virb.

Dave Troy, the guy who created the wonderful Twitter visualizer Twittervision, has applied his magic to Flickr, releasing his brand new, highly addictive Flickrvision.

Making things even better, Chris Bailey has created Visionary Saver, a MacOS X screen saver using both Twittervision and Flickrvision.

24 Hours of Flickr takes place tomorrow, Saturday, May 5th. Photographers from around the world will submit a photo that illustrates one day in the life in the Flickr community. Selected photo submissions will be used for a 24 Hours of Flickr book, with $1 of each book sale going to Médecins Sans Frontières.

What happens around the world in one day? In a word – life. Here on Flickr, our members are sharing the world that they see: snapping daily moments, recording history, telling stories, capturing beauty.

To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in 24 Hours of Flickr, a day-long global photo project. On May 5 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures.

For more information and to participate, join the 24 Hours of Flickr group.

Michael Arrington just broke the story that tomorrow Yahoo! will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos in order to focus on Flickr as their primary photo sharing service. I think this is an excellent decision by Yahoo! and will be a huge boost for Flickr, one of my favorite web services (I now have over 17,000 photos on Flickr).

If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Yahoo is currently one of the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and co-incidently has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.

Mike also mentioned that according to Stewart Butterfield Flickr will soon be supporting video. Now that should make things really interesting when it comes to video sharing services.

UPDATE: Valleywag called this back in February.

MOO, the company behind the wonderful MOO Flickr MiniCards and MOO NoteCards, are flying out from London next week to have a special MOO Meetup & Gallery Show on Tuesday, May 8th at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. MOO founder Richard Moross and his team will be in town for this special party and gallery show, where they are hanging the walls with beautiful implementations of MOO MiniCards and NoteCards.

So, we’ve rented 111 Minna, and a bunch of us are flying out from MOO HQ in London to hang out with our friends on the West Coast, on a night that is likely to include an exhibition of cool MOO stuff, loads of freebies, a rockin’ DJ and drinks on us.

The event is free, just bring a MOO card. More info on Upcoming.

JPG Magazine, Flickr and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery have teamed up for a photography exhibition: “Breakthrough: An Amateur Photography Revolution”

The show opens tomorrow night, Friday, April 20th and runs through June 16th. On May 31st there will be a panel discussion associated with the show at the San Francisco Public Library. Here’s more info from JPG Magazine.

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery presents a multi-faceted exhibition and a panel discussion examining the new digital environment that has revolutionized the way photographers shoot, store and share images. Our examination centers on the empowered digital communities fostered by two Bay Area enterprises that are helping to define and push the boundaries of how images live within a virtual ecosystem.

MOO, the London based company that makes those amazing Flickr MiniCards, just launched a new product today: NoteCards. Like the MiniCards, you can choose from your photos on Flickr to be printed on the NoteCards, along with custom text, which you can then mail to people as a set (the NoteCards come with envalopes). Here’s today’s announcement MOO blog and Flickr.

We miss mail! Not email, we get tons of that, but real mail. Delivered by a friendly postie, straight to your door. So we dreamed up NoteCards - square prints made from your own photos or designs. They have a magic flap on the side, to make them stand up proudly on your mantel, bookshelf or window sill, and are perfect for mailing to friends.

MOO let me order a set of Note Cards test out with my photos. They arrived this week and are really cool. Here are some photos I shot of the set that I recieved.

Last month at SXSWi 2007 I met Richard Moross, founder of MOO and recently had a chance to hang out with him, especially this week at Web 2.0 Expo. He told me that they are planning a special MOO Meetup and gallery show at 111 Minna Gallery on May 8th. Stay tuned for more info on that one, it should be a great event.

SFlickr, the monthly Flickr users meetup in San Francisco, celebrated their 2nd anniversary last night at Crossroads Cafe. Of course as one might expect, I shot a few photos last night along many of the talented Flickrati in attendance.

Big thanks to the SFlickrites it happen each month for two years running.

Last week WordPress launched a new Plugin Directory. Plugins are one of the best features of WordPress, allowing you to extend the functionality of your blog in countless ways. Previously these plugins, created by a worldwide community of open source developers, were scattered all over the place without a unifying interface, but now they can all be located in one central location.

Here are the top 5 plugins used on Laughing Squid:

1) Akismet - Absolutely essential. It kills comment spam dead.

2) Flickr Photo Album - Allows you to create a local photo gallery of your Flickr photos using the Flickr API and also it’s a great way to add photos from Flickr to your blog posts. Here’s my previous writeup on Flickr Photo Gallery plugin.

3) flickrRSS - Lets you to add your last batch of Flickr photos to your blog via RSS.

4) Google Sitemaps - A really simple way to create and submit your sitemap to Google.

5) wp-cache - Sets up caching for your blog using static files, which is a great way to improve the speed and performance of your blog, especially under high loads, like when one of your blog posts makes the front page of digg.