I hope he tries to make another MMO.
I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.
Around the time the MMO failed, they received the grant from the second application. They had something vaguely similar to photo-sharing chat in the game, related to discussing inventory items, and decided to transition to that as a photo-sharing IM client and use the grant to get it off the ground.
> As part of the game, they’d developed this interface where players could create an inventory of objects that they would pick up. That inventory looked like this sort of shoebox of photos. You could drag those photos into group conversations for other people to see and you could annotate them. And you could share the photos with other people. And that was the idea that Caterina and the people on her team wanted to transition to.
(from 2.)
As an aside, I highly recommend listening to the full interviews, as she has an interesting background and some good perspectives on tech in general. She also just launched a podcast that considers the ethics of some new tech developments [3].
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[1] https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...
[2] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail/rnh444/the-accide...
This level of adaptability might explain part of their success. Rather than naively sticking to your original vision, identifying where you have the opportunity to create value and changing direction based on that insight.