The last time Stewart Butterfield invented the future it was by accident.
In late 2003, his Vancouver startup was almost out of money and it had to abandon work on Game Neverending, a Web-based video game heavy on social interaction. The nine-person company stripped down what they had built and what emerged was Flickr, the photo-sharing website that now ranks among the world's most popular.
A year after Flickr launched, Yahoo Inc. bought it for $30-million (U.S.) as the hurricane of social media began to swirl. Mr. Butterfield and co-founder Caterina Fake landed on the cover of Newsweek with the headline, “Putting the ‘We' in Web.” Today, Flickr holds some four billion photos.
Mr. Butterfield worked at Yahoo for a few years in California, but he tired of the big-company scene and quit in the summer of 2008. He attended a meditation retreat and did some day trading – including a bad bet on shares of Lehman Bros. before the startup itch set in again.
Now he's back in Vancouver, and his new company, Tiny Speck Inc., has big plans to tap the online interactive wave he helped create.
Can Mr. Butterfield hit another grand slam? What's different this time around is the audience for social networking online is far more vast than college kids and computer geeks. And Tiny Speck has some serious Silicon Valley backing that will help his company avoid running out of cash before the job is done.
“The Internet's moving towards fulfilling the promise everyone who was online early saw in it,” Mr. Butterfield, 36, said in an interview. “It always seemed everyone would eventually be on it and we're getting to that point. The idea of going on the computer at night to socialize doesn't seem deviant or creepy any more – it's what normal people do.”
That includes people like Mr. Butterfield's mother, who recently signed up on Facebook, joining more than 300 million active users and adding to the site's fastest-growing demographic – people older than 35. Ms. Butterfield promptly added her son as a friend.
Tiny Speck hopes to hit the chord of connection that has moved decisively into the mainstream. While still mostly shrouded in secrecy, Tiny Speck is building what's called a massive multiplayer game, and the roots of the genre go back to text-based programs in late 1970s, accessed by early computers and modems.
Such games allow multiple players to develop characters in fantasy realms. The most popular of the bunch is the medieval-themed World of Warcraft. It has more than 10 million subscribers.
Tiny Speck, started by a quartet of the original Game Neverending /Flickr team, including Mr. Butterfield, wants to do for online gaming what Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s Wii did for video game consoles. The Wii's success isn't about better graphics or faster computer processing. Its appeal is about fun, social gaming for everybody, grandmothers and children, not just teenage boys and young men, the core audience of titles like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto .
“There hasn't been, yet, a great realization of play online that we have in the real world, the kind of social interaction people have playing poker or bridge or a board game or a round of golf,” Mr. Butterfield said.
Inspired in part by the artistry and sensibilities of writers Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Jorge Luis Borges, Mr. Butterfield says Tiny Speck's goal is to create a “fun and really interesting world with its own rules, absurdist and strange but fully realized, if imaginary.”
The game is set for release in the second half of next year and Mr. Butterfield, after the smash hit of Flickr, has serious backers.
The first is Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is ranked as the world's top financier. It backs a panoply of companies – it invested the first big venture capital in Facebook, $12.7-million in 2005 – and just this month was involved in two deals together valued at more than $1-billion, when Google Inc. bought mobile advertising company AdMob and Electronic Arts Inc. acquired social media game maker Playfish Ltd. Tiny Speck also counts the creator of the original Web phenomenon Netscape, Marc Andreessen, as an investor.
