Google dumps lively
Goolge announced this week that Lively, it’s quasi-virtual world service, is going to be shut down on December 31st. I’m not sure what to make of this, partially because I never had the chance to experience it due to being a windows-only application. I guess a lot of people were underwhelmed, as I was, when this first rolled out.
Kudos to Google for taking a chance. As they stated in their blog post, not all risks succeed. Often times failure provides the best learning experiences. Here’s to hoping Google re-enters this space at a later time, with a better platform.
Categories: Virtual Worlds
The Livelyzens (Lively users) are coming together to appeal to Google to keep Lively alive.
Lively is a great platform for interaction as well as creativity. It is easy to use, browser based, embeddable on webpages to bring a 3D experience right on your website. While Lively has been in beta and has limited capability in terms of the objects and avatars available, the Livelyzens have been able to come up with very creative ways to create art from what is available. All this in a “clean” 3D world thanks to Google’s vigilance in getting rid of rooms with inappropriate content. More than anything, Lively has become a place to make friends for life – from all over the world with wonderful people.
Please visit our website http://livelyzens.com and participate in the Lively Machinima contest we are conducting to show the creative potential of Google Lively. Please also sign our online petition http://livelyzens.com/petition.aspx
We request netizens to support us in reviving a wonderful 3D world that is a kid friendly and a creative space for art and interaction amongst adults.
Cherry,
Thanks for the links! I’ll be sure to check them out and try to help keep the world alive. I wonder if Google’s vigilance in removing inappropriate 3D content played a major role in the decision to shut down the service? I don’t know how much content was inappropriate, but it takes a lot of time and resources to monitor and purge content like that. I’d be curious to see what that broke down to in $$$ and how that impacted the decision to close.
Hi Thanks for the reply Bartman, I just wanted to add what Livelyzens have achieved in the week since the closure annoucement in a bid to make Google aware how good this product could be!
In an attempt to sustain the product, Livelyzens (Lively Users) are demonstrating the power of Google Lively - the 3D world that Google has decided to shutdown on December 31st 2008. Today Livelyzens unveiled a concept room called “Babel Miss : Google Translate” which has a TranslatorBot Avatar that translates from english to spanish and viceversa. This feature not only facilitates communication within a multilingual virtual world but also shows the utilty of Google Lively as learning tool. The room was engineered by RandomHuman and built by freecoconuts.
“Put .en or .es on the end of your nick so she knows what you speak, and then she’ll attempt to translate everything you say into the other language (Those stand for English and Spanish). Google could build this feature directly into Lively to provide each user with seamless realtime communication with others whose languages they don’t speak. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out what this would mean for education, for commerce, or for simple friendly communication.” said Random explaining how the room worked and intention behind the concept room.
This is by far the most exciting feature on Lively ever since it launched , ironically developed by a lively user in less than 5 days rather than Google in their 2.5 years of developing the product. The Livelyzens plan to unveil other concept rooms in the coming days in a push to make a case to Google about the potential of Google Lively and why this wonderful 3D world should not be shutdown.
See the room for yourself by visiting: http://www.lively.com/dr?rid=7499084429716312257(you would need to sign in using your gmail id and downloading a small lively plugin from Google’s http://www.lively.com).
I think this is the genesis of what occurs when you try to take a novel concept such as second life and try to make a similar platform without any idea of where you are going to go with it.
There was never anything novel or unique about lively, it was just a commercialized version of second life with less capability and limited user options when you create something to the scale of second life, there needs to be an actual value to the user. Either that or it needs to be a unique idea that draws people in. There was no real plan for the future of lively nor any practical use for it.
Lively, if they would have waited to release it, could have been a raving success if it was marketed correctly or made practical. By the same token, Lively is one of those products that can make a return once someone figures out some good use for it.
Its a shame to see an interesting product like this fail. Even Google seems to be tightening the belt in these tougher economic times.
I was actually just introduced to it the other day after it was announced it was closing, and I would have been interested to see if it could have been blended with a learning solution like Second Life currently is. It seemed to be lighter on the system resources then say Second Life.
“Lively is one of those products that can make a return once someone figures out some good use for it.”
Exactly! I think Second Life went through a similar cycle…educators were not always in Second Life, it took us a couple years to get solid prototypes and proof-of-concepts in place before adoption from the education community increased. Lively was going through a similar phase from what I understand.
I’m a mac user so I still have not had a chance to try Lively, but what makes it different from something like Raph Koster’s Meta Place? MP seems similar, and actually runs in a browser so I’ve been able to play around with it.
Going back to the Lively/Sl comparison, I think Lively is NOT a persistent world, rather a smattering of individual ‘rooms’ that can host several users at the same time. For me, one of the key elements of a virtual world is persistence. I can see how Lively may turn some people off because it may feel ‘isolated’, even though some pitch it as a VW (and the same could be said of SL, but it’s very easy to find people in SL if you seek them out).