When Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. started Game Neverending in 2002, there was no money from Accel Partners. In fact, from the start through the sale of Flickr, the company raised a total of just $900,000, though at the end a funding offer from Accel Partners was on the table. Going with Yahoo, in retrospect, was the wrong choice, in terms of how much Flickr could have been sold for – but at the time, on the advice of veteran investors, cashing in made sense.
The secret of success at Flickr was twofold: Timing and a willingness to change. The timing was the important trends that underpinned Flickr; affordable digital cameras and high-speed Internet at home became common, and people began to communicate via photos (“here's what I'm up to”) and share them online.
Flickr's origins were flexible, from coming out of a video game to constant tinkering as Mr. Butterfield and his team listened to ideas and watched how people used the service.
“We had it all wrong in the beginning,” Mr. Butterfield said. “We found the correct wrong things to fix.”
It was only after the February, 2004, launch that one of the most important features of Flickr was added, the ability to “tag” photos by subject – which makes the ever-growing public collection easily searchable and sparks connections between users – an idea suggested to Mr. Butterfield by friend Joshua Schachter, who started Delicious, a social book-marking website.
Even as the tool was added, Mr. Butterfield figured people would use tags to organize their own photos, but it immediately became a collective device. Users created all sort of categories, such as early favourite “FUH2,” pictures of people giving the finger to Hummer H2s.
Looking to 2010, Robert Scoble, the widely followed technology blogger, identifies several “battlefronts” on the Web. Two of them, real-time interaction and social networking, are at the heart of Tiny Speck's work, and the others include high-definition video, which is set to become cheaply available like digital cameras in the past decade, and anything and everything mobile.
Growing up in Victoria, Mr. Butterfield's been around computers since he was a kid. There's a picture of him as a young boy in a yellow Radio Shack Computer Camp cap on his Flickr account and he remembers writing a program in Apple Basic that drew the flags of the world, the simple ones, like France's tricolour.
At the University of Victoria, where he did his undergrad in philosophy with a focus on neuropsychology, cognitive science and linguistics – the workings of the mind – he got an account on the school's Unix server, basically geek heaven. He was also a big Phish fan and connected with other lovers of the jam band to trade tapes. “That seemed to be the principal application” of the Web, Mr. Butterfield joked.
Mr. Butterfield then completed a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge in England but decided against academia and joined the dot-com mania of a decade ago at a web-design firm in Vancouver, four years before Ludicorp started.
His philosophical instincts colour his view of the web, which he first used in 1992 at UVic. He cites the futurist Paul Saffo, who has noted humanity typically overestimates the short-term value of an invention–the Internet, circa 1999–and underestimates its long-term potential.
Mr. Butterfield sees unlimited potential in connection billions of minds. “It's a profound shift,” he said. “Maybe more important than anything that's happened before.” He pulls back a bit, puts the web in the league of the establishment of agriculture, the domestication of animals for food, the wheel, the printing press.
“It's in the top-tier of things that ever happened.”
