One of the best perks of working at Yahoo! is getting to attend first-class talks, especially when the talk is by one of your favorite groups. In this case, Flickr!

Flickr schwag: lens cleaner, phone cleaner, or iPhone 4 reception-enabler?Flickr schwag: lens cleaner, phone cleaner, or iPhone 4 reception-enabler?

…and it helps if one of the speakers was once a member of your team (Markus was in Yahoo! Mobile until recently).

Markus Spiering of FlickrMarkus Spiering of Flickr

I probably can’t chat too much about the future improvements they talked about, but I’ll just say there are some exciting plans for Flickr in the coming months! As you may already know, Flickr recently launched its new photo page. Markus went over some of the key new layout improvements, including the new prominence of geolocation and camera model information, which was previously buried deep in the exif info. He and Chris Martin also explained some of the improved photo navigation. Also, for anyone interested to know, the entire site was redone using YUI 3.

Chris briefly went over the public Flickr API they provide.

What’s really exciting is the amount of phones Flickr is being integrated into. It really says something when the top camera model for Flickr is the iPhone. More generally, just think of all the possibilities with packaging Flickr into lots of other phones out there (not everyone has an iPhone, after all!).

Markus was also proud to exclaim that not only was the native Flickr app featured in the recent WWDC keynote, but it was also featured in iPhone commercials around the world (“There’s an app for that…”). Coincidentally, later that day Apple approved the latest version of the Flickr app, which now supports uploading in the background!

Chris Martin of FlickrChris Martin of Flickr

Keep your eyes peeled on Flickr! Cool improvements heading to a screen near you…