As our first post as one year old, I wanted to thank everyone who has used Flickr, loved it, hated it, contributed to it, learned from from the community, taught us about it, told us about what we should do and which direction we should take it in. We have amazing users. Now hundreds of thousands (!) of amazing users. Thank you.

[If you’re interesting in visualizing how all those people relate to one another and how the communities have grown and intertwined to get us to this point, check out this thread on Visualizing the Flickr social network which came out of the spiffy graphs that GustavoG has been creating.]

And I also wanted to thank the team who has put in incredible effort and a lot of sacrifice to get us where we are. I love working with all of you. And I’m embarrassed to say that we’ve so far neglected to welcome two new hires we made in the new year, John Allspaw and Aaron Straup Cope. John’s in charge of Flickr’s massage therapy (which will soon have run its therapeutic course) got a nice congratulations from an old boss.

Aaron will be well known to long-time bloggers, web geeks everywhere and for coding Heather Champ’s mirrorproject, one of the coolest and longest running photo projects on the web. He’ll be working his prodigious scripting chops to make Flickr ever-better.

And yes, the photos – I came across a cool group earlier today called Catchy Colors. It’s like this: