We’re very excited to announce that Flickr now supports video!

Yes, those videos you’ve been accumulating on your hard drive or cell phone finally have a great place to hang out, meet other videos, and be loved.

Adding the ability to share videos on Flickr is a natural extension of our mission to be the “eyes of the world” — letting our members share what they see with the people who matter most to them, be they family and friends, or the world. As we set about adding video to one of the world’s most loved photo sharing experiences (Flickr has over 25 million members worldwide who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos), we did a lot of homework. We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

• Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras
• People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.
• While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

Until now. Check out some of the great videos shared by members of our Beta program:

So here’s how it works. If you’re a pro member, you can go to Flickr and start uploading your videos now. Video on Flickr works the same way as photos. Features you know and love like easy uploading, tagging, sets, sharing, privacy settings, adding to groups, geo-tagging, interestingness, and stats all work for video just as they do for photos. We support videos that are up to 90 seconds long each and up to 150MB large. Your unlimited storage limits still apply — so go ahead, push that to the limit.

Why 90 seconds?
Most video that people capture is, in actuality, fairly short-format content captured on digital still cameras. Our research suggests that most of it is actually under 60 seconds, and 90 seconds should be a pretty comfortable limit. As with (most) other features on the site, we’d love to hear feedback.

Why pro only?
Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr. Starting with them seemed like the right way to introduce such a significant new feature to the site.

So what are you waiting for? Free your videos — share them on Flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
General Manager, Flickr

Every photo has a location – it was taken somewhere. Unfortunately, there haven’t been very many great tools to allow browsing of photos by location. At Flickr, we take this challenge pretty seriously and have been working hard to figure out the best way to allow our visitors to see the world through the prism of the incredible, incredible photography on Flickr.

To that end, we’re completely making over Flickr’s map explorer and preparing to introduce a new Places Pages feature. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is giving a preview of these great new additions at the Web 2.0 Summit, so check it out if you can.

The new Flickr map will display tags that will hover over specific locations, representing interesting and newsworthy things going on there. Clicking on any tag will take you to a photo stream of the popular and current photos related to that topic in that location. This is a great way to browse through news and events on a global basis – a forest fire here, a folk festival there, and fireworks in that other place. It’s like getting a pulse on the world by listening to a million camera shutters snapping pictures in unison.

Helping visitors discover photos by location is key to Flickr’s vision of being “the eyes of the world.” Our new Places Pages will provide a zoomed-in way to explore virtually any place in the world through iconic photos, popular tags, relevant Flickr groups, featured photographers of that region, along with local information such as a detailed map, current time, and temperature. What’s really cool about these pages though is that they are literally built by our members. Each photo, photographer, or group featured on any Places Page will be included because our members found them interesting as an aggregate group. There’s a lot of math to keep the content fresh, relevant, and awe-inspiring, but the end result is just stunning.

The new map and Places Pages are not yet available. We’re putting some finishing touches on them in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the Flickr blog for the official launch.

We want to thank our 15 million members for making Flickr so fabulous and for sharing their amazing images with the world. With these new features, we invite you all to explore the world through the eyes of Flickr members – it’s truly a humbling experience.

UPDATE: Both new features are now live!

Kakul Srivastava
Director of Product Management, Flickr