Google shutting down virtual world 'Lively'
A scene from 'Lively,' the virtual world Google launched in July and which it said Wednesday it is closing at the end of the year.
(Credit: Google)
Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.
Lively was Web-based and allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages.
But the project never picked up much steam.
Now, Google has decided to shut the project down.
"Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year," Google said on its official blog Wednesday evening. "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."
The post said that those who were working on the Lively team would be reassigned to other areas within Google, suggesting that the move does not mean layoffs.
Google also said that because the project is being shut completely down, it is encouraging "all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."
Disclaimer: My wife works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel.
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Watch for SL to ultimately wind up as a bidding target between Google and Microsoft, much as they competed for Yahoo, but with one of them actually winding up buying it. My money is on Microsoft, who despite a public preference for "reality enhancement" technologies, will realize that a Second Life-type client could make a terrific next-generation PowerPoint tool and be a much needed boost for their XBox personal gaming business.
An interesting item for those of us in Second Life to note, is Google's admonition for people to copy their Lively rooms to preserve all their "hard work." Because of IP theft concerns, SL offers no built-in method of backing up everything you have created and purchased. If SL ever decides to follow the Lively path into "virtual oblivion," hundreds of thousands of hours of creativity and millions of dollars in purchased value could be lost forever.
Krisjtan.
AKA... BAD ADVERTISEMENT.
Where's the games, where's the player created content?
Oh, that's right..... it's at www.Whirled.com
Maybe Google should've had a chat with Three Rings on a business model...
Too little too late google, but good try.
All of the conformant VRML97 written in 1998 still runs in 2008. Apparently, the furries are not just a little smarter than the Lindens and the Livelies.
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 at http://www.petitiononline.com/golively/petition.html
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.