Tiny Speck has raised $10.7 million in a second round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners. Next week Tiny Speck will be launching a beta test of their online social game Glitch. Tiny Speck was founded by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 and since then several employees left to join Butterfield on this venture. Glitch has several APIs for building game add-ons. Alpha testing of Glitch started about a year ago. This investment will be used for speeding up the game development and the infrastructure behind it. [VentureBeat]

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr is now working on an online video game company Tiny Speck. Before building and selling Flickr to Yahoo!, Butterfield originally wanted to create an online video gaming company.

Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield

Sheperd Johnson is a Flickr user that 1,200 uploaded graphic images of Guantanamo Bay prisoners as comments on the White House Flickr photo stream.  Yahoo! Flickr quickly removed the images and told Johnson that his images were gone forever.  They offered him $25 as compensation and blocked all of his messages.  Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield even called Johnson “a dick” for doing what he did.

Yahoo! VP of Customer Service Heather Champ told Johnson that his photos were deleted because he was considered a “spammer” for putting all the images as comments.  Johnson’s account was also deleted without a warning.  Champ also told Johnson that his images were way too graphic.

Johnson was doing this as a way to get attention over President Barack Obama’s support for a controversial bill that suppresses government torture pictures.  To compensate for the lost images, Champ offered Johnson a Flickr Pro account and a $25 gift card.

“She tried to shower me with platitudes like ‘Oh I know you are passionate about this issue,’” stated Johnson in an interview with Valleywag.  After dealing with Johnson, Champ uploaded a picture that indicated her day wasn’t going well.  Johnson commented on that picture stating “this is like watching a slow train wreck.”  Champ blocked him.

Johnson then decided to contact Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, who had left Yahoo! last year.  After the jump is an e-mail conversation between Johnson and Butterfield.  The e-mail from Butterfield calls Johnson “a dick” among other things.

[via ValleyWag]

Stewart Butterfield (left), Cal Henderson (right)

Many engineers from Flickr have been laid off as part of a massive lay-off that took place at Yahoo! yesterday.  Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson and Co-founder Stewart Butterfield are now rumored to be parterning on a new start-up.

Butterfield resigned from Yahoo! in June 2008 and Henderson left yesterday.  The new start-up is expected to revolve around social gaming according to Kara Swisher.  Yahoo! purchased Flickr for $35 million in March 2005.  Caterina Fake, wife of Butterfield and another co-founder in Flickr joined a start-up called Hunch as the chief product officer.