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."

Comments

Oblig.

[cosmocain]

...They should change the name in Deadely.

Re:Oblig.

[Mister Whirly]

Yeah because outside of Slashdotland (a.k.a. "The Real World") the use of Vista or XP is almost nonexistent. Everybody knows that the masses use OS/2 with Gopher primarily.

Anthropomorphism

[multisync]

Google wants to 'prioritize his resources and focus more on his core search, ads and apps business.'

Google wants to prioritize his resources?

Well, good for "him."

Re:Anthropomorphism

[truthsearch]

Oh, you haven't heard? Google's become a sentient being. Google scrapped the project because there's no reason for him to live in a virtual world when he can simply live in the real one.

Re:Anthropomorphism

[iamapizza]

Nothing wrong with your cache, Google Lively is just that bad.

Re:Anthropomorphism

[multisync]

Considering this comment, maybe we should be calling the Google "sir."

Mis-quoted

[daybot]

The odd gender usage is a mis-quote:

TFS:

prioritize his resources and focus more on his core search, ads and apps business

TFA:

prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business

Re:Mis-quoted

[ari_j]

The standard rule on Slashdot is that the summary can only correctly quote the original article if it does so in a way that makes context inscrutable. Otherwise, the only option is to horrendously misquote the article.

The best part here is that the summary uses the right possessive pronoun to refer to the blog that it quotes, but changes to the wrong one in the quote.

I didn't even know about this

[djm300]

Google seemed to be surfing the Second Life wave...

Not surprising...

[new_breed]

..as this idea was laughed at multiple times on slashdot;)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/10/1428221
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/09/1210218

Re:Not surprising...

[oodaloop]

Then again, so was going outside, soap, and leaving the basement.

Re:Not surprising...

[HardCase]

Shampoo is for posers. I use Realpoo.

Re:Not surprising...

[jambox]

SOAP? WE use that all the time thanks. Nothing wrong with lightweight text interchange protocols...

Good Riddance

[Ngarrang]

No, srsly. Good by, Lively. Of all Google betas, this one has stinker written on it from the start. I have a reasonably fast PC, memory and internet connection, and Lively was a dog! A one-legged dog trying to run in the 100 yd dash.

Maybe instead of a multi-user interactive world, they can turn search results into 3D experience. You enter your search term and a cloud of results appear. You move about, click on a result to see the page, or click on it to get a different set of search results. Efficient? No. High Eye-Candy factor? Yes.

Re:Good Riddance

[xpulsar87x]

Didn't they try this back in 1997 with VRML? It was useless then, it hasn't changed now.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

2nded. That's a fucking disaster.

Re:Good Riddance

[bendodge]

3D interfaces are nothing but eye candy without a 3D HID. That's the reason people are willing to pay for something like Google Sketchup, which is generally underpowered as a 3D design environment, but has a decent interface to hack a 2D mouse into a 3D environment. We need to get over the idea that 3D interfaces are going to make it big. They will never do that while we are using 2D pointers.

Re:Good Riddance

[vux984]

they can turn search results into 3D experience.

It's UNIX! I know this!

Re:Good Riddance

[rho]

It's worth noting that Google didn't write SketchUp. Google bought SketchUp. The app's original authors deserve the credit for creating a first-rate schematic design tool.

Re:Good Riddance

[paganizer]

In 1997 I did a VRML copy of a shopping mall for a company based in Cincinnati; I went to the physical mall site, took a boatload of pictures, and set up the site as a test project on a 128k ISDN connection.
in order to keep server loads down, I split the mall up into 4 sections; each section was able to handle between 20-30 stock avatars (on 128k, remember) without crashing. very often.
each mall shop front was a door to the retailer; I put together a textures and objects package for them so they could continue the "theme", giving hopefully a seamless transition from the Mall environment to the store environment, including some CGI scripts to handle a VRML shopping cart. Each mall quarter had a information kiosk intended to house a staffer to answer questions, and the food court area was set up for social interaction between avatars (it was buggy, would have got better).
It worked perfectly. not quite up to 2nd life graphics, but closer than you might think; I had a plan to have the mall give CD handouts that would contain hi-res textures, the more complex objects, and the VRML client, since most people were on dial-up then.
They went ape shit. loved it. showed it to several major retailers, who also loved it.
Wanted me to come to Cincinnati to run it. I said no frakking way, or a variation thereof; I don't need to live there to run it, anyway. turned into a sticking point. they bought it from me, I bought a Jeep.
They hired a pretty high level geek to run it. He never could get it working right, probably because I'm a sort of intuitive designer (read: I don't comment), eventually they scrapped it. about 2 years later I started seeing some of the objects & textures for it in some commercial applications.
They never even made an effort to contact me for a fix; I talked to the high level geek sometime in 2003 (slashdotter, you know who you are). He said they were so pissed at me for refusing to move to Cincinnati that the veep in charge refused to even mention my name, had the guy go through it line by line to make sure I wasn't mentioned anywhere in the comments.
SO, it was a workable VRML e-commerce environment. shot down in its prime. Could have been a contender.

What's that?

[goodmanj]

Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.

Re:What's that?

[jacquesm]

I didn't realize google announces their new products on ./, I thought they had a homepage of their own, which draws significantly more traffic. If google would draw some attention to the stuff they launch on their own homepage then it might actually work.

It would also help if the service wouldn't suck, but that's another matter, that would serve to keep the people once they've found it.

Re:What's that?

[eln]

It's not that we hadn't heard about it, it's that we heard about it and dismissed it immediately as a bad clone of a bad idea, and ignored it after that.

It's possible that with everyone scared about the economy these days, Google will finally do what every other company does and seek to monetize all of its offerings. If it has something that costs a lot of money without bringing any revenue in, that thing will be gone. Even Google will run out of cash eventually if it spends all its money supporting every dumb idea its employees come up with.

Re:What's that?

[multisync]

If google would draw some attention to the stuff they launch on their own homepage then it might actually work.

If Google did that, their homepage would look like a MySpace page and nobody would want to use it anymore.

Dear Google,

[ticklejw]

If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.

Re:Dear Google,

[Lodragandraoidh]

Actually that energy would be better spent working on the OpenSim project to improve a well established grid and help solidify standards for interaction between the Second Life grid and other grids, than to waste energy on a dog that doesn't have a fraction of the capabilities already present in the open simulator.

Re:Dear Google,

[kripkenstein]

If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.

Probably not an option for several reasons.

The first is that the Lively client is based on Gamebryo. This is closed-source, and extremely expensive at that (it's a top-tier game engine, these things can cost $100,000 or more, easily). So the client code is essentially useless for open source purposes (as part of a derivative work of Gamebryo, doing so might even be prohibited according to the Gamebryo license, but I don't know).

As for the server, Google generally isn't in the business of open sourcing server components of theirs (although exceptions have happened), so I doubt it will happen in this case.

Re:Dear Google,

[dominic.laporte]

There is also the open source virtual world wonderland built in java and based on the (also open source) darkstar

Wasnt a bad concept

[gmuslera]

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.

Tag

[Thanshin]

"Deadely" shoud be a tag for "cancelled for spending too much with no visible benefits".

Re:Tag

[salarelv]

http://www.dead.ly/ :D

It's not an easy thing to do...

[Max Romantschuk]

I've never tried lively, but I did give Second Life (with it's rather amazing content creation and scripting abilities) a try. The way I see it there's one major obstacle to these worlds: The "ghost town effect".

It's very resource intensive to simulate a 3D world, especially a vast one. Making the world big is eeexpeeensive, and the power required to run an arbitrary world is huge.

With MMORPGs people are paying each month, and a lot of the on screen action relates to NPCs. In something like Second Life every character is a real person with associated lag etc. It's also impossible to optimize a user generated world like a game, which imposes certains limits within a level.

All in all, Second Life at least is a huge world with comparatively small amounts of people scattered all over. The world just doesn't seem "right" when you go exploring, and most areas are empty. Sure, people gather here and there, but overall it feels like the tech just isn't there yet...

Re:It's not an easy thing to do...

[GMonkeyLouie]

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.

Re:It's not an easy thing to do...

[smellsofbikes]

SL ghost-towns for the same reason that so many other VR's, both textual and visual, have.

1. People go there and build a few cool things and then realize that they're social and want to hang out with other people.

2. People don't live there; they only go there when they want to do something interesting. So there aren't people sleeping and eating and *using* all that space that they've created: they're all gathered together in a few small spaces, interacting.

I think that's a fundamental problem -- not even a design problem, just a problem with human psychology -- that makes any non-goal-oriented VR end up as a vast barren wilderness full of abandoned artistic creations, with all the inhabitants hanging out in one place.

Re:It's not an easy thing to do...

[demi]

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.

Line of thought

[Thanshin]

> Then again, so was going outside, soap, and leaving the basement.

"Leaving the basement IS going outside. What's he talking about?"

"hmm"

"I should make a post pointing that clear mistake... clickity post reply... Let's see... how to point the mista... waaaaaait a second..."

OUTSIDE THE ENTIRE HOUSE?!

Re:Line of thought

[Enderandrew]

Yes, you can even find yourself west of house, next to a mailbox.

Now let's look back on some stupid reporting

[patmfitz]

http://blogs.computerworld.com/why_googles_lively_is_great_for_telecommuters

Remember the date: July 8, 2008. Today is the day virtual worlds go mainstream. The reason is that Google has launched its own 3D virtual world called Lively. It's free. And it changes everything. Especially for telecommuters.

The current iteration of Lively seems to border on the goofy and cartoonish. But eventually, it's likely that Google's virtual world will become mainstream to the point where enterprises actually conduct real business there.

Like instant messaging and social networking, Lively will probably start out as a trendy hangout for teens, only later to become indispensable for professionals first for internal communication, then later to replace some business travel and even trade shows and the like.

Kudos to you, Mike Elgan, for your keen insight.

Good

[ethana2]

Those resources are better used porting sketchup to linux. You know, after Duke Nukem 3 is out..

Re:Good

[ethana2]

Grarghg, Duke Nukem Forever, sorry. Duke Nukem 3 has been out for a while I think.. Comment preview needs to be a post-post edit period.. When you just want to post something, how long are you going to look it over for typos you're sure you haven't made? How do you edit comments here? ..hmm.. Evidently not after posting. Which is just like.. you can't. Blast.

Deadly

[oodaloop]

when I play a dope melody. Anything less than the best is a felony.

Ah, the classics.

And does anyone care?

[NoNeeeed]

It's as if a million voices cried out and then went: "Lively? What's that?"

Seriously, a knock off of Second-Life? What were they thinking. SL is pointless enough, did anyone there really think that this was going to be a goer?

There is this obsession with 3D worlds, computer interfaces, or file managers. People are convinced that just because something is technically more complex and sophisticated that it must be better. People keep telling us that soon we will be using voice controlled 3d AI interfaces, while missing the fact that none of these things actually make life easier. Why should I have to use a 3D world just to talk to someone? Why use a video phone when I just want to talk, not see their face?

Just because voice recognition is more sophisticated than a keyboard doesn't mean that it is intrinsically better.

The TV didn't kill the radio star. No matter how much more technically complex it might be, you can't watch TV while driving the car or walking down the street.

Re:And does anyone care?

[default luser]

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.

Nothing of value was lost

[metamatic]

Yup. How they expected to compete with Second Life with a Windows-only client I don't know. Good riddance.

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[Kent Recal]

They probably intended to compete over the 98% windows users before caring about the other 2%...

Re:Nothing of value was lost

[Retric]

Windows is below 92% of the market and falling fast. Going windows only is probably costing you 10-15% of future sales.

as opposed to...

[Lord of the Fries]

This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products...

...as opposed to most of the rest of Googles products which are still in Beta.

I tried it...

[SuperCharlie]

I jumped on Lively when it was first announced, set up and furnished a room. The engine was slow but after it loaded it wasnt that bad. The application iteself always felt like an honest Beta, like there was something more to do before it was "real". Navigating around in Lively was a pain at best, users were never allowed to create and upload world items and the biggest issue was that once you finished outfitting a room, well, you had a chat room and that was about all Lively did.

I think they realized that they would either have to put some serious investment into this to make it worth it or drop it. Lively was an outside bet that just didnt pay off.

Microsoft Bob

[argent]

Google has finally had their "Bob". No big deal.

Now if they had let you put avatars into Google Street View and the rest of the Google Earth line-up, that would have been cool.

No, it was Niniane's pet project

[Wee]

Lively was (is?) headed up by Niniane Wang, one of google's hotter engineering types. She used to work at microsoft games, and so was really pushing for a 3-D experience type thing. I personally never saw the point. But Niniane is something of a diva at google, and so she can basically do whatever she wants. Anyone cute, female and employed pre-IPO can pretty much do whatever they want no matter how pointless, come to think of it.

I tried Lively when it was an internal alpha, and just didn't understand the utility of it. I wasn't sure how they were going to monetize it, either. Or what it had to do with anything, really.

I did enjoy going to meetings Niniane held. Her being hot and all.

-B

Re:No, it was Niniane's pet project

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot? This???

Seriously dude, eww. I wouldn't screw her with YOUR dick.