Google’s Lively Experiment Ends

12/04/08 01:12:15 PM

This summer, Google launched Lively within Google Labs. When we first looked at Lively, it seemed a close cousin to Linden’s Second Life. Users create virtual avatars within a 3D social networking space.

Recently, the Lively team announced that they will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. The development team members will shift to Google’s core businesses–search and advertising. Honestly, this announcement didn’t come as any surprise to us.

Lively offered cool technology without a clear business purpose. Sure, you could possibly embed advertisements within the Lively environment (much like in-game billboards). Yet, would enough people use Lively to make the investment worthwhile?

The current economy takes some of the blame for the end of the Lively project. Yet, Lively was an experiment in “what’s possible.”In the future, we’ll see other multi-user virtual worlds emerge.

Interactive virtual worlds can serve viable purposes beyond games and entertainment–as long as the worlds allow people to solve real-world problems easily or more effectively.