If you’ve been using Flickr today, you might have noticed intermittent problems: slow loading, pages failing to load complete, strange or incomplete results and things like that. These are the result of networking problems at our primary data center which have been recurring all day. And all day, we’ve believed those problems to be at the point of resolution, but then they turn around and bite us again. Ouch!

As usual, all your photos and data are completely safe. (We use multiple data centers which are staffed 24/7/365 and monitored from several NOCs around the globe and have everything backed up live.) However, while we switch back and forth between the old and new load balancers and networking gear, the intermittent problems will continue (Flickr is a monster when it comes to networking gear: with over a billion images served on the biggest days, we use a lot of bandwidth and have very intensive needs).

A dedicated team of hardworking supernerds is working on it now and we are all quite apologetic. Your continued patience is appreciated and we should have this resolved soon!

Update, 7pm pacific time (UTC-8): we seem to be running smoothly now and all’s well.

Photo from Kristal.

It’s now easier than ever to spread joy this holiday season by giving the Gift of Flickr. You can purchase a special activation code that you can give to anyone, whether or not they have an existing Flickr account. We’ve even created a special Gift Certificate card that you can print out yourself, fold up and stuff in a stocking, under a tree or hidden away for after the candles are lit (of course, you can also send the gift code in an email).

And it’s even better to give the gift of Flickr since now your recipients will get unlimited uploads — the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we’ve upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!

The Flickr team also wants to take this opportunity to thank you for a wonderful year and wish you and yours all the best of the season. Yay!

I was just laying on the bed next to Caterina — Flickr co-founder, who I’m also lucky enough to be married to, for readers who are just tuning in now — when, in reference to someone we know who works really hard to the exclusion of other pursuits, she said "No talk, we learn. Word for horse."

Though I immediately recognized the words, I couldn’t remember the context at all. "Where’s that from??", I asked her. "It’s one of themexican’s photos – go and search for that phrase."

And so I did, and there it was. Aha! And amazing how the description on a photo in Flickr can be part of our personal idiolect.

But also amazing is the fact that it was posted 23 months ago now. I’ve been following Raul’s stories for a long time. In this case, he writes:

Rashit in his yurt. He spoke several languages and was always trying to learn more. When he found I spoke Spanish he spent hours learning new phrases from me and steering clear of smalltalk. "No talk, we learn. Word for horse."

His dream was to visit Mecca. 

(In case you’re interested, the word for horse is caballo.)

• San Francisco Chronicle Flickr Pickr: Morning do
• Inc. Magazine, How We Did It: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Co-founders, Flickr
• Yahoo! Top Searches of 2006: A Great Year in Pictures features ten of Flickr’s most interesting photos from the last twelve months
• Check out NPR’s First Ever Holiday Craft Contest: Create a Menorah, a Kinara, an Ornament
• Who knew that the the Magic Donkey has a posse?

Photos from beebo wallace and michel v. See more photos tagged with "lights" in the holiday cluster.

Earlier today, our brothers and sisters at Yahoo! News launched a new "beta" site called You Witness News.  It’s a "citizen journalism" site which allows people to submit photos and video directly to the editorial desk of the biggest news site on the web. (And the photos, of course, are submitted through Flickr: you can select from your stream or upload a new photo to Flickr and submit it at the same time).

Selected photos will be packaged into Yahoo! News reports with credit to the photgrapher and seen by the millions of viewers around the world. In a later phase of the project, You Witness News will work with their partner Reuters to further select photos that will go out on the Reuters’ wire service where photographers can get paid for their newsworthy photos.

Check out You Witness News or join the You Witness News group on Flickr.

See more photos in the "Berkeley," "Stanford," "big game" cluster.

Photos from caryniam and mrtwism.