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> Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending

Wait, what? Never knew about this, that's a fun little fact.

The wiki says this:

> Flickr was launched on February 10, 2004, by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The service emerged from tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project, and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.



Eventually Butterfield and Fake got bored with Flickr and created Game Neverending 2: Glitch.

Glitch got pretty much exactly as traction as Game Neverending, which is to say "nowhere near enough to be economically viable". This time they spun off their internal chat tool to create Slack.


They are the best at creating anything besides games. Are they working on Game Neverending 3 already?


Yes, in which they needed a new AI for the NPCs and spawned LLMs


Hopefully the increased energy needs for advanced AI in Game Neverending 4 will lead to a major breakthrough in fusion power.


I'd love to be "that guy" who fails at all my game attempts, but accidentally creates businesses like Flickr and Slack along the way...


Didn't realize it was the exact same people who made Slack. Geez, I wish I could be that accidentally successful, much less twice in a row.


Caterina had nothing to do with Glitch or Slack. Stewart obviously did, but so did a lot of other GNE and Flickr founders and employees.


Glitch the game never even showed up on my radar. Too bad (or maybe, for the best) it was never something I heard about.

So I had to do some googling for what seemed like a pretty obscure thing that morphed into a huge thing that takes up way too much of my brainpower these days, and found this story about the shutdown of Glitch and the start of Slack https://johnnyrodgers.is/The-death-of-Glitch-the-birth-of-Sl...


Heh, this reminds me of how Discord was created.


And Slack came from their second attempt at an MMO, Glitch.




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