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.

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.

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.

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

[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!

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.

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.

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?!

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.

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.

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.

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