Google Lively set to shut december 31st

It is official Google have decided to close Lively at the end of the year. This will no doubt create a great deal of discussion about the future of the virtual world industry, maybe give some nay sayers some ammunition to be negative.
I do feel somewhat sad for those people that were the allowed developers and beta testers who created content, who spent time and effort making things and creating. They now have to make do with video and photos of their work.
Google does of course still have the mirror world Google Earth, which as I have said before we looked at a good few years ago when sat in the Wimbledon bunker and said “wouldn’t it be great to put the tennis scores and rallies on that”. Earth of course also has user created content, the 3d warehouse. It does not have the presence of other people as such.
Lively had the presence of other people, used a plugin in the browser but stuck to the room approach and only let a select few develop on it. This isolationism certainly stopped me from “having a tinker building things”. Yet the more open worlds, ones with UGC, with the ability to see the potential by using the creation tools, they are the effective ones.
Not everyone needs to build, but they do feel they need to have some sort of creative control over the world around them, or potential too. Its an important point and one we proved to ourselves on the Torque metaverse.
Anyway, well done to the Google Lively team for having a go, what you, and we have all learned can make the other worlds better.

3 thoughts on “Google Lively set to shut december 31st

  1. Pingback: LPT » Lost Potenial in Early Farewell to Lively

  2. Pingback: Lost Potenial in Early Farewell to Lively « Caleb Booker

  3. I wonder how much the current economic environment impacted Google’s decision. I think that Google’s involvement was a good thing for the metaverse. I suspect they will re-surface at some point (when it makes more sense).

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