The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack

https://buildingslack.com/the-death-of-glitch-the-birth-of-slack/

by ramimac • 2 years ago

124 37 2 years ago

greyface-• 2 years ago

Glitch was such a gem. Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a billionaire. I'm rooting for a fully-endowed Game Neverending 3 that doesn't need to be profitable to survive.

wslh3• 2 years ago

Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a billionaire

He also co-founded Flickr.

chowchowchow• 2 years ago

The Flickr acquisition didn’t make anyone close to a billionaire, the whole deal was for $25 million.

lastdong2• 2 years ago

Which was also a by-product of a cancelled game (also massively multiplayer online game) — this one never ended though

fidotron• 2 years ago

The part of this that never ceases to amaze me is the Butterfield playbook for accidentally successful startups seems to involve making an online games company of some kind, which fails, and then pivoting it into something quite different.

Doing this once is mad enough, but twice? He should be made to try again purely for science.

wmf• 2 years ago

Ev Williams has a similar playbook.

srpablo• 2 years ago

My favorite thing said about Ev Williams: with Twitter then Medium, he managed to kill blogging _twice._

astrospective• 2 years ago

For me it’s not even just the pivot, but the internal tool they built incidentally that’s the product they pivot too.

daemonologist• 2 years ago

:dusty_stick:

egypturnash• 2 years ago

"And that's what this game is/you're inside their thoughts/go and make them bigger/and you'll play for a long while"

- the video advertising Glitch contained in this post; "their" refers to the eight giants that imagined this world.

That's... that's the best they could do? "You'll play for a long while?" I think that's what the narrator's saying, she kinda mumbles that line, it's all delivered kinda half-heartedly like she's ashamed of the lack of anything to really do in this so-called "game".

It's over a bunch of screenshots of crafting mechanics. And crowds of layer avatars. Was there anything else here? If there was any actual building they sure were not advertising it; there's been a lot of multiplayer games that have less in the way of actual game mechanics but usually there's room for a ton of player-created content, and Glitch sure does not look like it had that, despite the fact that the previous attempt at this thing is what Flickr grew out of.

How the heck did they spend three years on making this thing without ever finding something more compelling to advertise than "uh multiplayer and crafting and some pretty art, I guess"?

jameskilton• 2 years ago

It turns out, there's a huge market for this! Had Glitch not been stuck on Flash and was able to pivot to mobile it may have been a success.

My daughter, her friends, her cousins, are all obsessed with Toca Boca (https://tocaboca.com/) which is nothing more than digital "barbie", a game you can play forever, fully powered by your imagination.

It's also the reason Minecraft is still so popular: it's a platform for creativity. Games don't always have to have an end-goal.

michaelwilson• 2 years ago

Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing all the artwork and other assets for the game into public domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One, Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.

pm• 2 years ago

I hadn't seen Toca Boca. My friend's niece plays on Everskies, which I believe is something similar.

vichle2• 2 years ago

Anyone know what Butterfield's next thing might be?

anyfoo• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem very well thought out to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5pWqpPCy7c

ttul• 2 years ago

Hopefully he gets some rest. I bumped into him in the airport once and he said something to the effect of, “I’m very tired, but I’m not about to stop now. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and I’m not going to get it a second time.”

vichle2• 2 years ago

If anyone deserves to rest, it's him :)

Still looking forward to seeing what he can come up with next time though.

droideqa• 2 years ago

This was mentioned in "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away"[0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Quit-Power-Knowing-When-Walk/dp/B09PV...

d3VwsX• 2 years ago

There is a mention of the Glitch assets, but I did not see any link? Looks like this is a good place to look: https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art

I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything. The old Glitch site that hosted the content now just redirects to slack.com. It looked like this in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20131209034741/http://www.glitch...

codetrotter• 2 years ago

I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it to my hoard, never using it for anything.

If you or anyone else in this thread want to do a small short-term favor for others, use a web seed capable BitTorrent client to download the torrent from https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art and keep seeding it for a while. This way other people who want to add it to their hoard can leverage BitTorrent for what it’s best at instead of everyone doing web dl from IA :)

The BitTorrent client I am using is not web seed capable, but by downloading from other peers I can also keep seeding it for others. I have a computer in my home that’s on 24x7 that I use for seeding some public domain torrents, alongside seeding some open source torrents also.

Cannabat• 2 years ago

Very interesting that discord also effectively evolved out of a failed game, albeit a few years after slack.

kevingadd• 2 years ago

Citron (who founded Discord) also was involved in OpenFeint, a mobile game social SDK that started out originally as a game for the iPhone called Aurora Feint. So it's kind of cyclical in a fun way - game, social tool, game, social tool.

I expect this is a pretty common story on a wider basis and people sometimes overlook it. How many bug trackers or build systems started out as internal tools for managing some other product? Etc.

mattl• 2 years ago

I remember finally getting a version of Chrome that came bundled with Flash on Linux and playing Glitch. Stewart was there to help me through the first part of the game.

greenthrow• 2 years ago

I played the preview of Glitch and it really wasn't much of a game. But the chat was good. I told them as much, as others probably did as well.

sakesun• 2 years ago

A number of great apps were built by game devs.

dcrazy• 2 years ago

If Butterfield was calling the product “Slack” from the beginning, I wonder why their iOS app’s bundle ID is com.tinyspeck.chatlyio.

varun_ch• 2 years ago

https://buildingslack.com/we-cant-call-it-slack/

We made up some goofy ones, including chatly.io – a gentle joke at the expense of startups using alternative TLDs at the time under the .ly and .io suffixes. We even registered our iOS app under the name com.tinyspeck.chatlyio because we hadn’t settled on a name by the time we needed to make it available for our alpha users to download from the App Store. Slack's iOS app is, in fact, still registered under that name; by the time we secured slack.com in June of 2013, we had thousands of users on iOS and didn't want to make them download a new app. We also weren't confident that they would come back.

JCharante• 2 years ago

Based on the title I thought this was about Glitch, the chat app that was semi-popular in OSS projects. Or maybe I’m misremembering the name

FusspawnUK• 2 years ago

I remember them having a pretty fancy api that would allow avatar exports and all sorts.

Ended up releasing a little xna forward running app game thing that used it and got to chat with the dev's a little, think it was eventually chucked on there blog.

Good times. Internet had more weird and fun shit back then

The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack

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