Google Lively Doesn't Pay Off, To Shut Down At the End of the Year

Google has announced that it is shutting down Google Lively at the end of December, according to a blog post.  Lively was launched in July. "Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives," says the post. 

The post goes on: "But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."

Comments

[livelyzens]

The Lively Users (Livelyzens as we call ourselves) are coming together to appeal to Google to keep Lively alive.

Lively is a great platform for interaction as well as creativity. It is easy to use, browser based, embeddable on your wesbite to bring a 3D experience right on your website. Though being beta, it has limited capability in terms of the objects and avatars available, the Livelyzens have been able to come up with very creative ways to create art from what is available. All this in a "clean" 3D world thanks to Google's vigilance in getting rid of rooms with inappropriate content. And more than anything, Lively has become a place to make friends for life - from all over the world with wonderful people.

While we are just starting to pull together our appeal plan, a preliminary website has been set up:
http://livelyzens.com and we plan to voice our opinion and suggestions through our blog, machinima vidoes on our youtube channel and more.

We request the netizens to support us in reviving a wonderful 3D world that is kid friendly and provides a creative space for art and interaction amongst adults.

[len]

For those that build rooms in these initiatives, this is when an open unencumbered content standard is real. It's an old story but screenshots and videos just don't do the job when it comes time to recover content on another platform.

Most of the industries that field expensive content have content standards for situations like this when you have to pack your stuff into the backpack and bail. The virtual worlds industry? Nah. Who needs 'em?

Dumb. Just gullible and dumb.

[Giulio Prisco]

I think Likely was always intended as a reconnaissance mission in touch-and-go mode: find out what is behind the enemy lines to help organizing the real push. I am sure G will be back.

[Erasmus Hartunian]

... because we figure that by December, it will be cheaper to just buy SL instead ...

[len]

I'm not so sure, Giulio. There are some businesses Google should not be in. The company DNA isn't suited to the kind of management and investments to make a go of virtual worlds. Google is emerging as a beans and potatoes infrastructure provider and although they could certainly host them, being a manager of them doesn't seem to fit.

This is something business customers should look hard at. Just because they are good at operating server farms and indexing doesn't mean they are the right outfit to manage medical records even if they host businesses or departments of health that do.

But ANY 3D content builder and their customer who are investing in a 3D world for any reason should be asking how content can be kept alive when the servers are turned off and the tools are shuttered. Not doing that now is the height of sheer dumb. The content is expensive. The tech writers and their managers knew that thus XML and it's ilk. Not perfect but better than nothing. The graphics artists and their customers seem to care less as long as they can go chat together.

Dumb. Just dumb.

But wait? Won't IBM take care of all of that for us?

And dumber still.

[Fred]

Len, many people within virtual worlds are creating for fun. They don't worry about whether their chosen virtual world collapses.

Not everything in life has to be a future proof investment.

Chill, dude! :)

[len]

No.

I'm aware, Fred, but it makes not one wit of difference to the industy. The point has to be made to any investor or business user that unless there is a way to get the content off the dieing platform and rehost it, the content is lost and any investment they make goes with it. That means a standard part of the contract states the precise means and expectations.

Quit buying kool-aide expecting Dom. Quit listening to the hype masters who tell you one platform or another has the next big thing or right solution and do the diligence to find out if a platform supports a standard of interchange. If not, find one who does. Until the money holds the industry in the fire over this, then this is a huckster's paradise and its customers are second rate fools.

Every content type in the web has these conditions set except this one. Dumb is the only word for it.

[Richard Trigaux]

I am sad, but not surprised, of the failure of Google Lively.

As a matter of facts, we must wonder why people remained in Second Life, expensive and buggy (295 dollars per month for a sim, it is by far the most expensive of the worlds) and did not switched to Lively, which claimed to offer them the same thing for free.

Few seem to understand that the success of Second Life comes from the fact it is offering in one place a full set of tools and fonctions: building, customized avatar, discussion, group tools, search and teleportation, etc. And above all, that it does this in a totally neutral and transparent way toward our opinions, philosophies, styles, tastes, etc, allowing everybody to live his second life as he likes, to realize his dream world. Lively offered only a part of the tools (youtube videos did not compensated for the lack) and above all its caricatural avatars were the dream of only their creator…

Facing the disastrous management and recurrent bugs of Second Life, I hoped that the powerful Google would propose a reliable and pleasant product, with a more reasonable price. At least they have the capacity to do so. After the deception when discovering Lively, I hoped again it was only a test, with in sight the preparation of something more serious. But no, seems that quite simply Google did not understood.

Pity.

Did they have in mind that people would come in Lively just to look at advertisings? (Second Life is just limiting them to only shops).

[CS]

In an attempt to sustain the product, Livelyzens (Lively Users) are demonstrating the power of Google Lively - the 3D world that Google has decided to shutdown on December 31st 2008. Today Livelyzens unveiled a concept room called "Babel Miss : Google Translate" which has a TranslatorBot Avatar that translates from english to spanish and viceversa. This feature not only facilitates communication within a multilingual virtual world but also shows the utilty of Google Lively as learning tool. The room was engineered by RandomHuman and built by freecoconuts.

"Put .en or .es on the end of your nick so she knows what you speak, and then she'll attempt to translate everything you say into the other language (Those stand for English and Spanish). Google could build this feature directly into Lively to provide each user with seamless realtime communication with others whose languages they don't speak. I'm sure I don't need to spell out what this would mean for education, for commerce, or for simple friendly communication." said Random explaining how the room worked and intention behind the concept room.

This is by far the most exciting feature on Lively ever since it launched , ironically developed by a lively user in less than 5 days rather than Google in their 2.5 years of developing the product. The Livelyzens plan to unveil other concept rooms in the coming days in a push to make a case to Google about the potential of Google Lively and why this wonderful 3D world should not be shutdown.

See the room for yourself by visiting: http://www.lively.com/dr?rid=7499084429716312257(you would need to sign in using your gmail id and downloading a small lively plugin from Google's www.lively.com).

[2008 Press release by www.livelyzens.com. Please use the Contact form on website for any enquiries]