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

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.

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.

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.

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.