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Stewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game called "Game Neverending": https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending https://gamicus.fand

Stewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game called "Game Neverending": https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system. That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought. Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".

Animats 3y ago
Did not know that. Such a progression is not unexpected, though.
notbeuller 3y ago
My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25 rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant content.
amatecha 3y ago
Glitch was really fun! My wife and I still joke about "Yellow Crumbs" every so often. I'm really pleased to see our profiles are still hosted on the website[0] in perpetuity. Was nice to see all my shared screenshots are still up on there... awesome :) [0] http://www.glitchthegame.com/ http://www.glitchthegame.com/
cromulent 3y ago
Flickr came out of an internal photo-sharing app, I believe. For a long time many Flickr URLs ended in .gne .

Animats 3y ago

Did not know that. Such a progression is not unexpected, though.

notbeuller 3y ago

My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25 rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant content.

amatecha 3y ago

Glitch was really fun! My wife and I still joke about "Yellow Crumbs" every so often. I'm really pleased to see our profiles are still hosted on the website[0] in perpetuity. Was nice to see all my shared screenshots are still up on there... awesome :) [0] http://www.glitchthegame.com/ http://www.glitchthegame.com/

cromulent 3y ago

Flickr came out of an internal photo-sharing app, I believe. For a long time many Flickr URLs ended in .gne .