One of the things I love about Flickr is its openness. We are open as a company, participating in discussions with our members on public message boards about our future plans, our (ever dwindling list of) bugs, and just about any other Flickr-related topic people want to talk about. It’s really very nice to work on a project where feature requests are public, complaints are heard, and new features are critiqued and appreciated in real time. The conversation is almost as much fun as the coding!

But more even exciting (at least to geeky me) is our openness to other software developers. The Flickr API, in case you don’t know, lets programmers build new applications that interface with Flickr. That means that anybody with an itch, a desire to build some photo-related functionaily that Flickr does not provide, can fire up their text editor and code something up, release it to the world, and we all profit!

Here’s a short list of some great apps and plugins that people have built with the Flickr API lately:

• A Windows screen saver by Sam Judson turns your computer into a slideshow of Flickr photos when you’re not using it. You can configure it to display photos from a particular person, from a particular group, photos with a certain tag, and more.

• Since we last wrote about it, Adriaan Tijsseling added a screen saver to the great Mac OS X app 1001.

• Flickr Gallery is a Word Press plugin by Ramon Darrow that lets you integrate your Flickr photos with your Word Press blog. (Complete with support for notes and sets!)

• Flickr Photosets is a Movable Type plugin by Jim Flanagan that’ll help you list your Flickr photo sets on your Moveable Type blog.

And for those of you just looking for some great photography and enough with all the geek talk, Ellen1970‘s photostream features some great wildlife photography: