Google plans to close the virtual doors of Lively, its short-lived
virtual world application, where users could chat and interact with
somewhat customized avatars.
“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 explained.
Even though
Lively was quite lively, in a sense, it wasn’t benefiting Google (and
perhaps its users), enough to continue dedicating resources to it.
Lively is one of several virtual world applications, including Second Life and IMVU. Most of these services have chatting and interacting
with live users.
Lively, however, had many limitations.
Lively allowed you to chat with
up to 20 people per room. Second Life and IMVU allow you to chat with
everybody online.
Second Life allows for the purchase of virtual goods, using real
dollars. Lively never reached this level of sophistication, as it only
offered users content created by the Lively team, and a few select
others.
Granted, Google is a company willing to experiment and offer us
products to enhance our lives such as Gmail, Calendar, Maps, and
Blogger. Lively just didn’t live up to any of these.
Google
summarized the discontinuation of Lively by saying, “We want to ensure
that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads
and apps business.”
Sounds like tough economic times have
hit Google too.
Lively opened its virtual doors in July of this year, and will be closing them on December 31st. Rest in peace, Lively.
