Flickr, the popular photo sharing web service added video yesterday. They’ve taken an interesting approach and only allow video clips of up to 150MB in size and under 90 seconds in length. Think the kind of little clips that you might shoot with your digital camera on the movie mode.

“But what’s the Tucows connection?” you’re thinking.

Last time we looked, there were about 565 photos on Flickr of our delightful and fun squishycows. We’ve handed out thousands of cows over the last couple of years and many of those who received them joined in the fun and contributed their own squishy pics.

With the addition of video to Flickr, the fun can expand considerably. Squishycow is no longer confined to a mere instant in time. She’s now free to explore a full 90 seconds of whatever adventures she might find.

Here’s some inspiration for all you closet Spielbergs:

Squishycow photos continue to pile up on Flickr. This week we’re featuring the work of Kayla Fleming who posted a couple of really nice shots of our friend around the offices at the hosting company where she works. I’ll admit to being somewhat jealous - Orlando looks nice and warm, while here in Toronto we’re already fighting through snow and ice.

We’ll be showcasing more squishycow photos over the coming weeks. If you’d like to see your shots on our blog, add your photos to Flickr with the tag squishycow and then add the photo to the group, Squishycows in the wild. We’ll post a new photo every week or so and link to your photostream.

Photo by Sarah McGee. For more of Sarah’s photos visit her Flickr photostream. Thanks, Sarah!

With a company name like Tucows, you really can’t escape cows – from black and white cowskin lettering on our software download site back in the early days, to giving away a live cow at a trade show (seriously, it happened), to squishycows, we’ve certainly embraced our bovine heritage.

The humble squishycow has become quite popular of late. We give out hundreds and hundreds of them, complete with a little tag asking that the new owner take some photos and post them on the photo sharing website Flickr with the tag “squishycow“. Last time we checked, there were over 500 photos of our squishy friend.

Squishycow drinks coffee and had a run-in with a sheep. She’s gone swimming, taken a flight, seen a NASCAR race and gone to the beach. She’s visited Paris, London and Niagara Falls. Squishycow has learned to program and got an iPhone.

Thanks to all who take the time to make some really beautiful images featuring the squishycow. We’re going to start featuring some of the best of the pictures on the blog over the next little while. To have your photo considered, simply add it to our Flickr group “Squishycows in the wild“

Mark Mansour at the State of Flux blog wrote this about how he and his fellow developers use a Squishy Cow to do agile development:

At our end of iteration review, like all good agile shops, we go through what’s good, what could be done better, what still puzzles us and what we are going to do next time (but details on this are for another post). We also have The Exceptional Cow™. Whoever has the cow is responsible for triaging all incoming exceptions for that iteration. At the end of each iteration The Exceptional Cow is ceremoniously passed to the next bovine herder. As the cow herder, you have the responsibility of examining all incoming exceptions and fixing it if it is a no brainer or writing it up as a bug for someone else to fix if you don’t have the time or if someone else has a much better grasp on the issue. Quite often all exceptions for the week are attacked in the final hours before we close off the iteration as we don’t want to start new functionality at that point.

Simply put, whoever currently possesses the cow is responsible for handling any bugs, whether it’s by fixing them or writing them up in a bug report. It’s rather reminiscent of the “talking stick” tradition among North American natives or the conch in Lord of the Flies.

It’s the most interesting and practical use for a Tucows Squishy Cow that I’ve seen yet.

(This was cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog.)

And now, for something completely different: a little squishycow juggling! I met this guy while attending RailsConf, O'Reilly Media's conference for Ruby on Rails developers. I'll post my report on the conference soon, but in the meantime, a little juggling for your Friday enjoyment:

The Tucows Squishy Cow certainly gets around! The latest sighting is on the cover of this week's Quick and Simple magazine, a weekly produced by Good Housekeeping, where she's used to illustrate the cover story, Goodbye Clutter!.

(Yes, I know that the Squishy Cows are manufactured by a company that sells them to companies other than Tucows, but I still think of the Squishy Cow as ours.)

For more Squishy Cow sightings, go check out Flickr; you'll find them tagged with either squishycow or squishycows.