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Google Terminates Lively
FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."
Google seemed to be surfing the Second Life wave...
Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.
Integrating virtual worlds with the web, or adding a new level to the communities you build around a site are things that should take off in some moment, not sure when, or if lively's implementation was the right one.
Probably something similar will appear shortly, or exist already, at least if the biggest problem of lively wasn't of the concept but that it dont fit in google's main focus.
"Deadely" shoud be a tag for "cancelled for spending too much with no visible benefits".
There's a house upstairs?
Didn't they try this back in 1997 with VRML? It was useless then, it hasn't changed now.
Yup. How they expected to compete with Second Life with a Windows-only client I don't know. Good riddance.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Seems accurate. The "ghost town effect" as you put it plagues many otherwise cool games/forums... or I guess sites that would be cool if more people were using them. Generally if you're not one of the first comers to the market to snap up a share of the early waves of people to realize the potential for a service, you can never recover. Tabula Rasa will never ever compare to WoW because it just never got the same kind of mass membership momentum and nothing can compete with that. Same goes for other social networking sites trying to compete with Facebook and MySpace, although I guess that's about the same because they're really text-based MMORPGs. Nyerk.
Well said! And conversely, the video phone has yet to kill the audio-only phone, although the tech has been around (and affordable) for 40-odd years. Picturephone used only three twsted pair wires, which was well within the capabilities of 1960s telephony tech. And sure, Picturephone was expensive, but today the tech is much cheaper, and yet there is little uptake.
About the only place you'll see video phones today are small niche markets (like field reporters, or soldiers on tours of duty phoning home). For most people, video phones are a solution searching for a problem.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I'm not sure I can agree with that. Remember that WoW was very late to a market that had already been developed my many MMORPGs--EverQuest, notably, and AC and others. I think that sometimes being first to market isn't an advantage at all, and Google of all companies is in a position to appreciate this, as Google succeeded largely by being very late to the search engine market.
WoW and Google succeeded so dominantly because they were better, and a big part of why they were better than the established players was because they learned from the existing market, and because they had no established customers they were worried about losing.
demi
This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products...
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Actually, that would be really cool. I know it is often remarked that Second Life is pointless and such but there are actually very well put together "recreations" of real world locations. It is kind of cool to be able to "teleport" between Tokyo, Paris, Dublin and Berlin. I know they are not 100% bu tat least you get a feeling of what the place is like. In fact, it could be a great way to increase tourism to your destination by recreating a "demo" of what a person may experience there but just enough so they have to see it for themselves. Google Street View could even take this a step further. Sure its great to see a picture of a place and sure it may even be great to walk around in that picture (Street View) but if you were able to get just enough of that "I gotta see it firsthand" factor you could rake in the tourist dollars.
Disclaimer: You may want to leave airport arrival and customs clearance out of the demo experience.