Virtual World Lively’s Plug Is Pulled By Google – Breaking News

 Author: Ecocandle Riel

(Brian Meeks in Real Life \ CEO at Riel Life Productions | Owner at Riel Life Productions)

At 9:04 pm Easter Standard time, one of the most promising ventures into Virtual Worlds, announced that they would be shutting down.  Lively, the Google experiment in virtual worlds, has decided that December 31, 2008 would be the end of the line for their attempt at creating a virtual world.  In their blog post, entitled “Lively No More”, “In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.”

What does this mean for virtual worlds.  I spent a fair amount of time studying Lively.  In fact, I taught myself 3ds Max in order to be able to create content for them.  It is surely a disappointment, but I don’t feel that it will have a major impact on the growth of virtual worlds.  Second Life, has continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace.  There are several other Virtual Worlds which are still in beta, and IBM is aggressively pursuing their vision.  I feel like the worst part of this news, is that it dashes the hope that someone with very deep pockets, and certainly Google would fit into that category, would dump tons of money into their virtual world, learn from the mistakes of Linden Labs, and create something vastly superior to anything now available.

In the second paragraph they indicate that they are going to focus on their core businesses.  With the global economy on shaky grounds, one can’t fault them for taking such a prudent step.  I guess that, even in a world where only our imagination limits what can be done, the realities of real world economics must still be considered.

Thanks Lively, we enjoyed our brief time together.

 

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html