Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield left Yahoo disillusioned and disgruntled. Now based in Vancouver, Canada, Stewart started Tiny Speck, Inc., to try again at social gaming.
He's revisiting the old idea of a mobile, multiplayer role-playing game called Game Neverending.
Stewart actually developed the game before he helped create Flickr.
The game was the first product at a startup called Ludicorp. But it was abandoned in favor of a photograph uploading and sharing tool built within the game, later known as Flickr.
We think Game Neverending is more likely to work now, because power mobile devices are more ubiquitous now then they were back in the early 2000s. (If you're reminded of Dennis Crowley's history with Dodgeball and Foursquare, so are we.)
Along with four core members of the original Flickr team, Stewart wants to create a “fun and really interesting world with its own rules, absurdist and strange but fully realized, if imaginary.”
Accel Partners and Netscape's Marc Andreessen are both early investors.