Look Lively!
by Tateru Nino 
Jul 9th 2008 at 2:30PM
Filed under: Betas, New titles, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, Lively
The Massively crew has spent a little more time hammering away at Google's new virtual artifice, Lively. By now, you've probably seen all sorts of news reports calling it a rival and competitor to Linden Lab's virtual world, Second Life. Technically, that's what we call bollocks.
Describing Lively as a rival to Second Life is like calling a conference center a rival to a library. They're just not servicing the same needs, and the comparison is fundamentally nonsensical. Lively is tightly focused, and fails to intrude on the bulk of virtual worlds space.
So, what's the deal with Lively? Let's take a look ...
Lively is a series of disconnected virtual chat rooms, each capable of holding up to 20 avatars at once. Rooms vary in size a little, up to approximately 500 square yards, and can be listed on the website, or remain unlisted.
A Lively room can be embedded in a web-page, much like a Metaplace space. Only a small snippet of HTML is required to do so. Windows users (only, at this stage) can view and enter Lively rooms with the aid of a plugin for Firefox or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The download is approximately 10 Megabytes and you can get it here.
As beta plugins go, this one seems quite stable and doesn't seem to be at any risk of crashing your browser unexpectedly. Big plus there. The lack of Linux and Mac support knocks the utility value down a couple of pegs. If you have the plugin, we've embedded a sample room just below this paragraph. (If it sits on Joining Room forever, go and sign into the website first)
There's nothing much unexpected about chatting in Lively. Click in the chat bar and type. The text appears in cartoony chat bubbles that Lively will try to keep in your view, regardless of where your camera is.
Movement is accomplished by double-clicking on a spot to teleport your avatar there, or clicking and dragging the avatar with the left mouse button to walk your avatar. Don't try to drag your avatar past the border of the camera view without repositioning your camera first, or you will get unsettling jumps and find your avatar in strange places.
Dragging the mouse with the right mouse button rotates the camera, and holding shift at the same time allows you to pan the camera.
Lively keeps things simple and does those simple things well. The television in our sample room is playing the trailer for Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A few clicks is all that is required to link a YouTube video to a television object -- but as far as we know, no other embedded video formats are supported.
All content that is currently in Lively is made by Google-approved developers, and is presently free -- though it looks very much like the majority of content in Lively will be pay-for before long. At present there don't seem to be any active plans to open up the system to user-created content, but we'd be surprised if there wasn't some of that before too long.
Permitted users can add objects to a room, and reposition them. If you can't see what you're looking for in your avatar's inventory, try the Shop for More buttons at the bottom of each inventory category. Lively wants you to go shopping. As we said, currently all the content is free, so why not?
If you want to interact with an object (sitting down, for example), single left click on the object. If you want to play an animation, single left click on your avatar, and select an item from the animations tab (different lists of animations are available depending on whether you are sitting or standing).
And ... that's actually about it. Lively is simple, and straightforward, and focuses on doing one thing well: The furnishable 3D chatroom. It can be embedded on a webpage and your avatar can be in multiple rooms at once via different browser windows or tabs.
If you've got a group of up to 20 people (who all have Google accounts and are running Windows), and want to share a Youtube video or sit around and shoot the breeze in a lightweight space, and having your own content isn't for you, then Lively is for you.
But a rival to Second Life? No more so than corn syrup is a rival for sea salt.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marianne McCann said on 3:04PM 7-09-2008
I played with it a bit, mostly to make sure my name was in the system, and your accessment ir right on the money. I would think more a competitor for IMVU or something, not Second Life. Also seems much more aimed at a teen level market. it is not a Second Life competitor.
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Nightbird Glineux said on 3:05PM 7-09-2008
Embeddable? The MySpace crowd will love it.
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FlipperPA Peregrine said on 3:35PM 7-09-2008
Be warned: we've had a lot of reports of peoples' SL avatar names already taken, and I've seen a lot of suspicious "bot like" names in the popular rooms. Do we have domain squatters here grabbing SL names for ransom? We'll see. It is just quite odd.
There have also been a lot of reports on browser crashes, especially under Firefox. It seems to happen when Lively is under heavy load, and can't get past the "Joining Room..." stage of the plug in. It makes me love Firefox's "Restore Session" feature even more!
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Marianne McCann said on 3:52PM 7-09-2008
I've heard of this too, which is why I grabbed my handle ASAP.
Kara Timtam said on 11:11AM 7-10-2008
Someone else nabbed my SL name, both with and without a dot separating the first and second names. I'm sure it's the same griefer gang that is sore that I keep busting their chops in SL. OH well, at least there does not seem to be much latitude for sim-crashing in Lively. The worst they could do is pretend to be me and make my sockpuppet make rude remarks. Anyone who knows me, knows better.
Thanks for the heads-up, Flipper!
ILL Robinson said on 3:51PM 7-09-2008
I agree that Lively isn't a SL competitor out of the box. But as with any product bearing Google's name, we can be rest assured we're only seeing the beginning.
Sure, there's no connected spaces or content creation tools yet, but the writing is on the wall - Google's entered the playground and had plans on taking over the sandbox.
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Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 5:01PM 7-09-2008
Actually, ILL, remember that Google is quick to retire products that utterly fail — in fact, even better than Microsoft. For instance, Google removed AdSense Referrals after having aggresively pushed it to all AdSense users as the only way to get more income. Now they've totally reverted their position and dropped the product. Sure, Orkut is still around and even allows applets, but is anyone still using it besides Brazilians? Google projects that fail disappear from the radar when the effort to support it (in costs of developer hours) is far higher than the rate of new users signed in to a particular product... Google's not different from any other company, the difference being is that they're continuously launching more new products coming from all areas.
Lively is... an experiment. It carries the power of the all-powerful Google brand. It's being pitched on the tech magazines (like Computerworld) as a tool for companies to collaborate in an immersive environment that allows easy contact with telecommuters. It's incredibly easy to embed on MySpace or Facebook. Rooms are isolated, so griefing is easily circumvented. Everything is childishly simple to use, since there are almost zero options. Put enough Google magic behind this, and it'll be a success overnight. Or perhaps it already is. For all purposes, everybody with a registered Google Account is a (potential) Lively user. That's 250 million registered users or so. Lively, in 24 hours, just became four times as big as the whole of the MMORPG/MMO/social 3D world userbase. Spend enough pushing this message/meme through the media and the blogosphere, and what do you think that the world will immediately associate with "virtual worlds"?
Is Second Life threatened by it? You bet it is. I think that Google is scared of losing the battle of the 2D Web, which they dominate. This is a very Microsoftian way to make sure their monopoly on HTML content does not disappear over time. Just push back the technology a decade and tell the world that "this is it". Second Life will be just the "in your dreams" technology for a borderline audience. And this can be sustained for ages. Look how 92% of the world still thinks that Windows is the better choice!...
As for grabbing SL names, I have no doubt that this might happen, like everywhere else, and the advise to register quickly is a very good one. I definitely did that, and like Aimee Weber and others, I've also registered the trademark Gwyneth Llewelyn® ;) because, who knows, someone out there (Microsoft?...) might be launching the next virtual world and I might not be fast enough... but my lawyers will :)
My disappointment with Lively is that it's so *bad*. Tateru is actually way too nice in her description of Lively. Try Meez to see how everything can be done so much better, with much nicer avatars, even easier to use, *interactive* content, and fully platform-neutral. Sure, it's as boring as Lively, but that's not the point: I was expecting much better from Google. Then again, since the launch of Gmail, the only exciting product from Google that really impressed me was Google Analytics...
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Rational said on 5:29PM 7-09-2008
I think... after looking at it for a few minutes... that it actually IS a competitor for Second Life. Not necessarily in it's current form, but with just a small amount of extension, it could easily dominate other VR chatroom.
Obviously it needs user-created content.
Obviously it needs some sort of secure asset server, to protect the rights of creators.
Lots of other improvements needed too. But user created content is the big one.
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stillsl said on 5:34PM 7-09-2008
Chat with graphics. Yep it's definitely second life - except no user created content yet.
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artifex said on 10:15PM 7-09-2008
I see many sex rooms, so yes it is certainly a Second Life competitor.
Seriously, though, I remember reading about this awhile back. The brains behind this want to see it go far and wide -- openly. I hope they get their chance to take it there.
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Pavig Lok said on 6:50AM 7-10-2008
It's interesting that google is there now, but not so interesting what they've done with it... hang on maybe it is interesting. They've stripped all the risk factors out of their entry into virtual worlds by making it an extremely potted experience.
This is a smart move on their part as it puts them in competition with a majority of the market (which is after all just avchat) in an area where their sheer bulk will give them good leverage. They've stayed out of any of the hard stuff that heavyweight virtual worlds like SL do which would make them look bad when they inevitably screwed up as heavyweight vw's do.
Now all they have to do is find a strategy for cleaning up the sex chats. yiffers, griefers and rickrollers and they're set :P
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ScytheNoire said on 8:52AM 7-10-2008
Needs flying penis'
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zaphodd said on 3:45PM 7-10-2008
I think the term 'second life competitor' is a bit too vague to define what the risk to Second Life actually is. It is definitely a competitor for users, and will be yet another 'me too' socnet app taking a piece of the market.
It's definitely not something that's going to fire the imagination and inspire creations like Svarga.
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sirhc DeSantis said on 3:35PM 7-10-2008
Oh its an SL killer alright. Also killed Lotus Notes, IE and a bunch of other stuff and left my machine crawling. Do yourself a favour and avoid it completely.
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