In 1998, I moved back to Seattle after living in Long Island, NY for 4 years. I had managed to wrangle a DSL internet connection from my previous employer, and had set up a domain, which was running out of my back bedroom. In late 1999, I discovered weblogs, and eventually created one of my own. In February of 2000, I found out about a local weblog meetup in the Belltown neighborhood, and showed up.

Through one of the friends I made at that meetup, I got involved with a game in development by a small group of folks that called themselves Ludicorp. The game was Game Neverending, or GNE. GNE was a social crafting game. You gather bits from the map, you combine the bits into more sophisticated bits, and so on. Because the game was in development, play modes were limited. I remember the social aspect, and the crafting most. Because of the limits, the players would get together and create their own objectives. One night I logged in to find a bunch of players were amusing themselves by trying to gather a large number of heavy crafted objects (harpsichords) into a node on the map called Bentown. I thought that was funny, so I took a screenshot, and warped it, as though the mass of the harspichords were warping gamespace. Emergent gameplay, unanticipated in its specifics by the development team, was a huge part of what made GNE attractive.

I was able to create this image and share it with the group of people participating because the GNE in-game chat, which was feature rich to support the social aspect, supported posting pictures in chat. The chat aspect of the game received a lot of feature work in the time I was playing.

One morning I logged into GNE, and Stewart Butterfield (a.k.a. St. Wart) sent me a DM.

“Have you tried Flickr yet?”

The Ludicorp crew had seen the potential in a collaborative environment where people could share images and they pivoted the social chat aspect into a completely different product. If I remember correctly, the earliest version of Flickr was still synchronous; Much more like chat than the web experience it quicky morphed into.

Many of the earliest Flickr users were also GNE players. And so early on, there was a lot of emergent play taking place on Flickr as well. One collaborative effort I recall was The Flickr Tarot, where we would make cards using Flickr, GNE, and Ludicorp themes. Many GNE users kept their aliases on Flickr. I was Abulafia (or Abu) on GNE, and so I was Abu on Flickr. One GNE/Flickr user created a calendar with all our birthdays on it. I imported it at some point into my Google calendar, and I still get notifications to this day about them.

Flickr also became a common ground for people to gather in the real world and either embark on photo strolls together, or just meet in a local venue and chat. I eventually extended my personal Flickr community beyond the original GNE players, to people in and around the city where I lived.

Digital cameras were just starting to explode. Digital photographers of all intensity levels were to be found at meetups, eager to talk about their kit. For my part, I was always on the lookout for a camera that I could have on my person all the time, but not something that was swinging around my neck or a target for theft; something we can take for granted today. I would occasionally set out on solo photo safaris around the city, hoping to capture the visual character and document it on Flickr, but I also wanted to be able to have a camera on me for happy accidents. I eventually found a credit card sized camera that took awful photos, then decided to stick to my DSLR.

Eventually, I came to use Flickr primarily to share travel and outdoor adventures as well as urban explorations, slowly leaving behind the ludic early Flickr experiences.

Flickr was one of the earliest online services that I can remember to expose a programmatic API to users. My personal weblog was implemented in self-hosted MovableType, which had a plugin system allowing users to write extensions in Perl. I took advantage of that to build a MovableType plugin which called the Flickr APIs to get a list of albums from my account, and display them in the sidebar of my blog. As I added new albums on Flickr, they automatically showed up on my blog. I posted this to the MovableType plugin directory, and forgot about it until I got an email from Stewart Butterfield letting me know that people using the plugin were reporting it was broken. There was a change to the API that I hadn’t known about. My own setup appeared to be working because I had cached the information locally.

When Flickr first put out a Pro option, I was an early paying member. I think the email receipt I got was 0000005. After a couple of acquisitions, I stopped paying, and the various proprieters keep threatening to delete some of my photos, but never seem to get around to it. I still use my Flickr account to help remember things, or place them in context, even though I don’t even think I can log into it anymore. I used it to jog my memory about this post.

All of the images in this post, except the second one of the weblog meetup in February of 2000 (which was taken with an Apple QuickTake 100) were selected from my Flickr account.

You can see more of my photos, and other random images gleaned from the early web, on Flickr.