"One of the things we’re moving towards is the interactive Google Gadget. We’re going to be opening the API up for that very soon that you can put on any prim," Kevin Hanna, Creative Director of Google Lively, said at the Worlds in Motion Summit today. He offered an example of putting in arcades and adding interactivity to spaces, which could be fun, but including more apps like Docs or Gmail could add productivity to Lively as well. It seems like the team's goal is to connect everything.Ultimately, he said, his hope is that "Livele becomes invisible," just another part of the Web.
"Everything [in Google] is something that hopefully works well with everything else, but everything is standalone experience," explained Hanna. "We wanted to do something that continued to bridge that gap. It’s a virtual world in a way that every room or space you build is a virtual world. We wanted to create something that is a piece of the puzzle."
Hanna couldn't give an exact date on opening up the API, but he says "that's in the foreseeable future."
He says that goes to Google's core goal of making those services available across different interfaces.
"It goes to Google’s philosophy of empowering the user," said Hanna. "Search goes for granted sometimes, but we don’t always think about all the little sub-apps like Image Search and so on and how everything is integrated. This is one more way to meet the users’ needs in different spaces."
Hanna said the product roadmap includes opening up developers licenses across the board, but, also opening up a game development API. That, however, comes after opening up the Gadget API.
"We’re going to open up the API for game development on Lively," he said. "Anyone can use the economy we’ve set up, the base we’ve set up. That opens up a lot of possibilities for everyone, forum my 11-year-old daughter to create a character that looks like her to independent developers chasing their own dream."
That economy won't be based on virtual currencies--"The official stance is that Google just isn't interested. [...] You're never going to buy Google Bucks."--but the platform will support peer-to-peer transactions, letting developers sell to users.
For developers looking to create content, Hanna said that Google will be opening up tools for developers in 3ds Max, Maya, and SketchUp.
However, the emphasis, said Hanna, isn't entirely on gaming. In fact, it doesn't appear that Google wants to emphasize one use case at all.
"As far as whether it’s an entertainment tool or a business tool, I think more than anything, it’s an information tool," said Hanna. "It ‘s a way for users to get and give information to each other along the lines of a social network, or something that augments a social network."
As for the initial user response, Lively has taken some knocks, including from the Economist, for being dead, but Hanan says, "our numbers are a lot higher than expected." In the first days, the team thought they were under attack from spam bots, but it turns out that they were simply actual users. "That's the power of Google," said Hanna.
As for adding support for Chrome: "That seems really obvious, but Lively doesn't run on a lot of apps. For example, I'm a Mac person. But, again, we're in a beta. Being in a beta, people confused it for the actual launch. The end goal, and actually very soon in the beta, it'll be working across multiple platforms, including Chrome."
Nice move on Google's part. I would very much like to see an open beta of the API from the very beginning, as opposed to a closed beta focused on "selected partners."
Posted by: Mark Lomb | September 18, 2008 at 12:43 AM