Last Friday, BoomTown dropped in on Stewart Butterfield, now ensconced in Vancouver, to see what the Flickr co-founder has been up to since decamping from Yahoo a while back.

Yahoo (YHOO) bought the innovative British Columbia-based photo-sharing service in 2005 for upward of $25 million, a sale that heralded the heady start of Web 2.0.

But Butterfield was gone by 2008 and was soon enough off traveling, until he landed in his native Canada at the Vancouver HQ of his Tiny Speck start-up.

In fact, it is kind of where Butterfield started, since Flickr was initially actually part of an original gaming project called Game Neverending.

Apparently, it never did end, and now there is Glitch. Almost, that is.

In any case, Butterfield showed me the latest iteration of the Flash-based multiplayer game, which takes place inside the minds of 11 giants.

It is full of creative quests, unusual graphics and fascinating but definitely odd worlds, so it will be interesting to see how people will react when the game debuts in early 2011.

You can see a demo of the Glitch game here, and watch my video interview below of Butterfield talking about all this and more at his office in the hip Yaletown section of Vancouver: