Google: Lively Didn't Meet "Tough Targets"; Looking to Use Tech Elsewhere

When Google shut down Lively last week, it did so with as little fanfare as when it launched the virtual world, just a short blog post. Not much more has come out past the thoughts of a few partners and observers, and Google has been fairly tight-lipped. When I reached out to find out why the virtual world project was being canceled after only five months (and years in development) and to find out what might have been, I heard much the same thing as the official announcement. Google wanted to take risks, but also recognize when a gambled hand was finished.

"We set Lively tough targets and it did not achieve them," explained a representative via email.  "But Lively did teach us about what our users like and what they don't. We learned people want to be social in many places on the web, and we learned that users appreciate the ability to meet new people and share content with friends. These are important lessons for future product development."

While the publicity rep declined to share specifically what those goals were, she noted that Lively currently has about 10,000 seven-day active users.

As for what's becoming of Lively, its team, and those learnings, things are still vague. X-Ray Kid, which was formed in early 2008 by members of the Lively content team as an external start-up and contributed significantly to development,  will continue as wholly separate company working on other unannounced projects. Members of the Lively team will move on to other teams and products within Google.

Lively itself may reappear, or at least aspects of the project, in other products, but there's no current announcement on that front.

"The Lively team invested lots of time and energy into building this product," wrote the rep. "Their talents and lessons learned will certainly apply to other products, and we're currently looking for ways to incorporate some components from Lively elsewhere. We don't have any specifics to share right now."

Comments

[yoba22]

if there is one lesson for Google to learn from it's this: Second Life is the most successful virtual world, because of the freedom it gives its users. freedom to build and script, and freedom to create every avatar you can imagine.
everything that offers less to me I won't even touch. Lively was a joke. Playstation Home will be a joke. Second Life rules, and Open Sim will rule.

[Ken Zhao]

I dont think Playstation Home will be a joke, it's a gamer virtual worlds(every gamer has an avatar, they can talk and join the event, play the game provided by third-party provider, exploring the specific game space, e.g far cry 2 already have a space in playstation home), not like sl and opensim as an open world.

[bkizzy]

My thoughts on the Lively shutdown and the year ahead for Virtual Worlds: http://www.dmdinsight.com/blog/post/134-q-a-with-popcha-on-the-future-of-virtual-worlds