Electric Sheep Company CEO Sibley Verbeck blogged some of his skepticism (and hopes) towards Google's Lively, which launched yesterday. Among his points, which, while I disagree with some, are worth a gander, is the fact that "Large media companies who are publishers of virtual worlds, including efforts to expand beyond the tween demographic, have told me directly that they are not interested in having their work in a new medium hosted by Google; they fear that they’ll lose more advertising models to Google down the road."
I'd assume--and that's just an assumption--that at least one of those companies is Viacom, since the media giant runs its own virtual worlds aimed at kids, tweens, and teens, and the Sheep list vMTV in their portfolio. That makes some sense to me since MTV has already worked with other partners to develop its own virtual worlds technology, but I'm curious about who else might be included.
Regardless, part of the issue seems to be from confusion on what exactly Google's plans for Lively are. There's no announced business model, though Mel Guymon, Head of 3D Operations, told me there are already plans for monetization. The only known money factor is that Niniane Wang, the engineer who began the idea of Lively during her 20% time at Google, told the AP that Google had no plans to allow advertising in Lively. Brands, however, seem to be welcome to create their own spaces through Google's white list of developers.
And, included in that, are media brands. The first--and only, so far--brand announced for work in Lively is the National Geographic Channel's LA Hard Hats, which is being brought to Lively by Millions of Us.
As Millions of Us CEO Reuben Steiger told me yesterday, there's just no data yet to predict whether Lively is a good place for brands or not. We can look at the underlying technology and community factors, as Verbeck has done, but it's still tough to predict, especially with Google's name attached.
One other factor, though, is that we might (and I suspect we will) start seeing brands launch in Lively like they did during the hype days of Second Life. You get plenty of publicity, but it remains to be seen how much actual traffic.
"There’ll also be some interesting effects just from being the first ones to go live," said Steiger. "We'll get a lot of incremental traffic for that. Afterwards we’ll have to figure out how much came just from that and how much from the experience itself."
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I installed and tested both Lively and Vivaty last night. The two good points about Lively were the integrated security and the fact that I could drop it on my blogpage and it just worked. The bad news is the navigation is worse than the 1990s systems and the 3D fared no better. Awkward.
Vivaty in Facebook was much more impressive. The 3D was quite good, the navigation was easy even on a RAM-starved machine, the 2D tooltips perfect for the new user, and the install just worked.
Vivaty's origins in the X3D/VRML world are vindicated. With all Google's might, they are shown up by a startup with a pedigree and a real standard. IBM et al in the interoperability forums might want to pay attention here. As one commenter said at Scoble's blog, we need to get out and quit listening only to our own echo chambers. The Long Tail A-listers may be very wrong.
A lot of these articles here are about business models. Sometimes you really do have to get the technology right first.
Posted by: len | July 10, 2008 at 07:57 AM