Google's Lively: Live public beta

by Tateru Nino Jul 9th 2008 at 7:00AM

Filed under: Betas, Launches, New titles, News items, MetaPlace, Free-to-play, Browser, Casual, Virtual worlds, Snow Crash, Lively

Open to the public just today, it seems hard to believe that Google's new Lively service is the much-vaunted virtual world product Project Snowcrash aka MyWorld that has been in secret beta-testing for some time.

Lively is a series of web-embeddable virtual spaces (think Metaplace) that function as a series of otherwise disconnected chatrooms (think IMVU or Twinity). You download the browser plugin for Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer (both Windows only, sorry folks), sign in with your google account, create a room or join one and you're ready to go. Just make sure you've signed into the Lively website at least once -- otherwise you'll have the Joining Room message forever.

A selection of 'hip' human and furry avatars are available, along with an assortment of clothing. There is no user-created content at this time. We'll have some more impressions for you once we've given this a once-over around the office, so stay tuned.

Tags: beta, breaking, browser, casual, firefox, free-to-play, google, imvu, launches, lively, metaplace, microsoft-internet-e..., new-titles, project-snowcrash, twinity, virtual-worlds

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Pavig Lok said on 7:35AM 7-09-2008

Lively is an interesting new entry into the 25 year history of room based avatar chat applications (15 if you only count the 3d ones). At the moment though, there's little to differentiate it from the rest of the top ten.

The low barrier of entry to these kind of av chat systems makes them hugely popular with the under 20s social market, which eventually often turns business and education off using them... but i digress.

It seems that at the moment Lively is pretty, but at about the level of 3d av chats from the early ninties in terms of functionality. We can see that it has the potential for user generated content, and could have better systems for privs built in at a later date. If they do this well in about a year it should approach activeworlds or vastparks level of interestingness. Even so they'd still have a way to go before reducing the gap between content creators and proper 3d game developers. Sketchup looks like a good candidate for integration there.

So the long and the short of it is don't pack your bags from SL yet. Lively has a LONG way to go before it catches up with what sl does well (if sometimes unreliably :). And before it eats SL it'll have to eat IMVU, Gaia, Kaneva, Metaplace and most of the rest of the industry first... after all, those are the virtual worlds that Lively's current model is closest to, and thus its direct competitors.

Just my two cents.

GRT said on 9:49AM 7-09-2008

It was a fun diversion for a couple of hours last night.

Someone call me when we can create our own content. Then it'll be truly interesting.

double9s said on 10:31AM 7-09-2008

Will Lively feature functionality outside of being just a fancy chat room?

From what I've read about MetaPlace, with enough effort put in, you could make your own MMORPG (which is why Massively covers it). I'm interested in that idea, but I'm not interested in a 3D chat room.

Rational said on 7:34PM 7-09-2008

Three words that you've overlooked: barrier to entry. By building a thin, fast client that's integrated with the browser, lively avoids all of the annoyance of those other 3D chatrooms. It's the fastest and easiest 3D chatroom setup I've ever seen.

And it's embeddable...