Stewart Butterfield and friends and friends in Vancouver, Canada who had a failing online gaming startup in 2003 turned their attention instead to photo-sharing, and the company, Flickr, that they created was so successful that Yahoo paid $30 million for it just months later. Now Butterfield is turning his attention – and money – back to the gaming business, to create a massive multiplayer game under the name Tiny Speck. Details are secret but the Globe & Mail in Canada notes that “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.” Gambling? apparently not. Global bridge? not exactly.

Links to other sites: Globe & Mail, Tech Vibes, Tiny Speck