Taken by wee2046, discovered in the Rolleiflex group pool.

With Polaroid’s announcement earlier this year that they’ve ceased production of their instant film, ‘Roid Week 2008 feels somewhat bittersweet. Will it be the last? Will a knight in shining armour rescue our fair maiden? While some are stockpiling their film (myself included), others are throwing caution to the wind to celebrate the joy and beauty of all things instant.

Photos from Esther17, meshel, cindi miller herleman, notraces.
You can view more photos in ‘Roid Week 2008.

Our new “Share this” button makes it a whole lot easier to share your photos, video, sets and groups. You can click the button and start typing the screen name of one of your contacts – auto-complete will do the rest. Or, you can enter any email address.

You can set a global preference (from “Only you” to “Anyone on Flickr”) on who can use “Share this” and “Send to a friend” via your account page.

More info about the changes to sharing are available in the FAQs, and do some sharing of your own by way of feedback in in this Help topic.

9:20 PM PST – Hey folks! Flickr is offline at the moment, and our Operations team is working as I type to bring things back online for your viewing pleasure. Sorry for the disruption, and we will update you as soon as we can.

9:35 PM PST – That was fast! We just had a networking glitch that took a few minutes to sort out, sorry for the interruption!

A trampoline, art supplies, a lawnmower, and four bottles of salad dressing. And did I mention computers and cars?

The world of Freecycle can be wacky and surprising, but it’s also downright useful and often heartwarming. That dusty old thing in your garage might just be perfect for someone right in your neighborhood or town. Traci from Poquoson, VA lost everything in a hurricane and posted a “wanted” message for a lawnmower in her local Freecycle group. Sure enough, she got the lovely lawnmower (picture above) – and discovered the donor was a colleague of her husband’s!

The basic principle is getting rid of stuff you don’t want anymore and giving it away to someone who does. It’s more meaningful than just dropping a bag off at Goodwill — on Freecycle, you offer your item and the person who wants it responds. You’ll be surprised at how true the old adage is, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Last year, after cleaning out my garage, I had an old monitor and box of black envelopes. I offered them up on Freecycle and was amazed that within minutes, there was someone from the local senior center who needed the monitor, and a non-profit that desperately needed the envelopes. If you have a great Freecycle story, share it in the Freeycle Treasures group.

Freecycle is an easy way to help someone out (and earn some good karma), and while you’re at it, celebrate Earth Day by keeping junk out of landfills (more good karma!).

Photos from tracidale, flymissy, TempletonElliott, Meukin, and Auntie_Doris

OuroborosX explains, “these photos are collaborations between myself and another lomographer… one person shoots one layer, then mails the roll to the other, and they shoot over it… when they are triples, sometimes there are 3 people involved, or if only 2 people, then one person shoots two layers and the other shoots one…”

What fun it must be to fling film between New York and Tel Aviv and wait with baited breath to see what develops. Somewhat reminiscent of the Blind Camera project.

Oh, and speaking of collaborating, you can hear the Flickr collaboration story from a variety of perspectives during this year’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco next week. Kellan has the details over at code.flickr.

In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

And our new developer site, code.flickr.com, is where you keep up with all that.

Open Source Uploadr

We haven’t talked about it much, but our latest Uploadr (the 3.0 branch) is actually a cross platform, open source application built on the XULRunner framework (the same technology that Firefox is built on). If you’ve ever had a wish for the Uploadr to work a certain way, include some particular feature, or just work better, you’ll want to check out Richard’s meaty blog post “Flickr Uploadr, start to now”, checkout the code from SVN, join the Uploadr Group, and start hacking!

Flickr DevBlog

We’ve also got a new blog written by the Flickr developer team for the larger Flickr development community. We’ll be covering changes to the API (look for a post covering video in the Flickr API soon), cool Flickr related projects we discover, writing tutorials on Flickr API methods, and most anything else which catches our whimsy. If you have something you like covered, you can let us know on in this thread in the Flickr API group.

And we’ve got rainbows! And gears!

Photo: “How Flickr Works” by straup.

Once upon a time, there was a man with a simple but beautiful dream. Flickr member and patriot Jake Rome wanted donuts. Free donuts. Free donuts from Flickr. With this noble cause, the We Demand Donuts group was born.

More than a year later, we’ve heard your voices, and have decided to help make Jake’s dream come true. This Wednesday, April 16th at 11:00am, we will be providing donuts for We Demand Donuts members in San Francisco. If you’re in the area, RSVP on Upcoming and then stop by for some fried doughy goodness.

Not local to the San Francisco Bay Area? Don’t fret. More donut day meetups are being organized all over the world by Flickr members — join them to meet up with some fellow Flickrites for a donut.

Whether you can make it to a meetup in person or not, we hope that you will participate by uploading photos or video of you enjoying a donut on April 16th — tag it “day of the donut”.

Select photos by esabet, tanya zivkovic, Fletcher Gravy, and Corgi T. Video by Superchou (with music by jmobley).