Google Takes on Second Life and the Sims With Lively

Posted on July 13, 2008

Google isn't leaving much left unchallenged in its battle for Internet dominance but it's new virtual world entry will need work. Lively is the name of Google's embeddable new virtual world. The downloadable service offers avatars that chat, emote and dance and users can create rooms replete with furniture and other objects.

The Lively avatars can also interact with these objects and with the avatars of other Lively users. What's missing is the expansive interactive world that Second Life has. It also isn't available for the Mac yet as Businessweek's game blog notes.

Lively is a mash up of instant message, chat room, virtual world, and Web page. Think: Second Life in a web browser. Rooms, like the avatars that represent the users within, can be customized and individually linked to. "If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website," Google's Niniane Wang said in the announcement post, "you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose."
Lively is a 20% project, still in Beta, and it shows. Even on a powerful machine the performance is clunky and, for the moment, it's Windows only. (Mac and Linux clients are on their way.)

Jose Gormez has an interesting review. In it he notes that porn has already made it was into Lively.

The fact that Lively isn't complete means that Google could make many changes to this service over the next 12-24 months. It is certainly worth keeping an eye on because Google is behind it. The embedabble feature could also make Lively grow much more quickly than competing virtual chat tools. The L.A. Times reports the National Geographic is coming to Lively so maybe this service will quickly get more interesting than it currently is. Here's Google's introductory video to the Lively world.

Update: Lively is no more.