Flickr Neverending

August 9, 2005 1:44 PM

Massively Multiplayer Online Photo Sharing. A too-brief interview with Eric Costello about how The5K * begat The Game Neverending* begat Flickr.* "There’s kind of a feeling of exploration within Flickr. It feels like a world where you can move around and find wonderful things – the wonderful things being the great photographs that people upload."
posted by grabbingsand (14 comments total)

Here's the article mentioned by Eric on how Flickr is like a MMOG.
posted by mathowie at 2:21 PM on August 9, 2005

Sigh ... I miss The Game Neverending.
posted by kmel at 4:44 PM on August 9, 2005 [1 favorite]

yeah, flickr is a visit once a week sort of thing....GNE would've been a visit once an hour sort of thing, and was.
posted by angry modem at 4:48 PM on August 9, 2005

Flickr is like Speed Racer - the cool and popular one with all the fancy gizmos. But deep in his heart, away from the crowds, he suffers from the insecurity of knowing he will never be as good as his older brother, Racer X - The Game Neverending.
posted by vacapinta at 4:50 PM on August 9, 2005

This will always be the highlight of my web career.
posted by mathowie at 4:59 PM on August 9, 2005

It's a real stretch to compare Flickr to a MMORPG, and it only comes up because people know the history. How is Flickr more like a game than LiveJournal?
posted by smackfu at 7:26 PM on August 9, 2005

i still havent figured out why everyone is/was so Flickr-giddy.

Buzznet kicks its ass so many different ways.

is there a magic killer-ap feature that im missing?
posted by tsarfan at 7:27 PM on August 9, 2005

I've never even heard of Buzznet before.
posted by smackfu at 8:07 PM on August 9, 2005

I really love Flickr. I remember hearing all the buzz about it last year and ignoring it. This year, I finally decided to start sharing some of my many digital photos. So I decided to try Flickr (after fooling around with doing it on my blog and on my own server).

I am now a Flickr addict. It's all about the community, and the relatively painless way Flickr allows the community to flourish.

I had no idea it had such interesting roots. Thanks for the link.
posted by teece at 9:12 PM on August 9, 2005

I miss GNE. Not the weird Flash-driven fruit-tree oriented hextile thing they fiddled with at the end, but the real thing running Eric's mindblowing DHTML client. The poor game would never, ever, ever scale to the degree they envisioned and still be so wonderful. GNE was great in no small part because of the small, fairly tight-knit community around it.

I've still got another few hundredish purple paper around here somewhere, ingredients for several thousand carrot loaves, and an uneaten christmas tree in my closet. Le sigh.
posted by majick at 10:05 PM on August 9, 2005

The thing I like the best about flickr is that I can put peoples photostreams into bloglines and know right away when they have added new photos.
posted by srboisvert at 1:34 AM on August 10, 2005

I licked a Mathowie once. Good times.....

Vacapinta's right. Flickr is fun, but GNE was a revelation.
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:31 AM on August 10, 2005

I've never even heard of Buzznet before.

Me neither. Seems ironic.
posted by yerfatma at 6:42 AM on August 10, 2005

Flickr's ok, but I'm pissed that I never got to play GNE. They should bring it back. For the record.
posted by squidlarkin at 1:05 PM on August 11, 2005