Tiny Speck is new Startup by Flickr co-founder

A year after Flickr launched, Yahoo Inc. bought it for $30-million (U.S.) as the hurricane of social media began to swirl. Mr. Butterfield and co-founder Caterina Fake landed on the cover of Newsweek with the headline, “Putting the ‘We’ in Web.” Today, Flickr holds some four billion photos.

Mr. Butterfield worked at Yahoo for a few years in California, but he tired of the big-company scene and quit in the summer of 2008. He attended a meditation retreat and did some day trading – including a bad bet on shares of Lehman Bros. before the startup itch set in again.

Now he’s back in Vancouver, and his new company, Tiny Speck Inc., has big plans to tap the online interactive wave he helped create.

Can Mr. Butterfield hit another grand slam? What’s different this time around is the audience for social networking online is far more vast than college kids and computer geeks. And Tiny Speck has some serious Silicon Valley backing that will help his company avoid running out of cash before the job is done.

“The Internet’s moving towards fulfilling the promise everyone who was online early saw in it,” Mr. Butterfield, 36, said in an interview. “It always seemed everyone would eventually be on it and we’re getting to that point. The idea of going on the computer at night to socialize doesn’t seem deviant or creepy any more – it’s what normal people do.”

That includes people like Mr. Butterfield’s mother, who recently signed up on Facebook, joining more than 300 million active users and adding to the site’s fastest-growing demographic – people older than 35. Ms. Butterfield promptly added her son as a friend.